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1 3 



PARIS IN 1789-94 



PA R I S 

IN 
I789-94 

FAREWELL LETTERS OF VICTIMS 
OF THE GUILLOTINE 






BY 



A JOHN GOLDWORTH ALGER 

AUTHOR OF "THE NEW PARIS SKETCH BOOK," "ENGLISHMEN IN 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION," AND " GLIMPSES OF 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION" 



WITH PLAN 



NEW YORK 

JAMES POTT fcf CO. 

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN 

1902 



^ 






Printed by 

Ballantyne, Hanson 6 s Co. 

Edinburgh 



By tr&uerfat 

FEB 11 1^»6 



PREFACE 



This is not a History of the French Revolution, for there 
are Histories enough and to spare, and no educated man 
lacks acquaintance with its leading events. It is a contri- 
bution to the psychology of those events or views them 
from new standpoints. For it is not sufficient to know 
that they happened ; we should seek to know why they 
happened. It is consequently necessary to probe the 
frame of mind of the actors and sufferers, and I have 
endeavoured, whenever possible, to let them tell their own 
story and describe their own emotions. 1 In the case of 
documents not intended for publication we penetrate 
behind the scenes, and are almost in the position of 
questioning the eye-witnesses. The volume takes no 
notice of the Parliamentary Assemblies, except their re- 
ception of picturesque or grotesque deputations, but it 
describes the local government of Paris, bodies which on 
some critical occasions coerced those Assemblies. It also 
shows what was the ordinary life of Parisians during 
that tragical period. I have utilised some of the masses 
of uncalendared manuscripts in the National Archives at 
Paris, and all references not otherwise indicated relate 
thereto. 

I venture to hope that with this fresh standpoint and 
this collection of new materials the book will be a not 
unacceptable addition to the numerous works already 
devoted to a phenomenon of exceptional, indeed almost 

1 See especially the reports of observers, Chapter V. ; the love letters, 
Chapter VII. ; the farewell letters of the guillotined, Chapter X. ; and Robes- 
pierre's notes, Chapter XI. 

b 



vi PREFACE 

unique, interest. For as a general rule not only is French 
the language known to any man acquainted with any 
foreign tongue, but the French Revolution, next to the 
revolutions which have occurred in his own country, most 
attracts his admiration or abhorrence. The history of that 
Revolution, too, is interesting not only in itself, but on 
account of the light which it is constantly throwing on 
contemporary events in France. French thinkers, from 
Tocqueville to Taine, are clearly justified, indeed, in 
regarding the Revolution as unfinished, for not merely 
is the problem of a durable form of government still 
unsolved, but we are ever and anon reminded of episodes 
and manifestations of the temper of a century ago. Some- 
times it is a desire for a military dictatorship, sometimes 
suspicions of domestic treachery or foreign intrigue. Now 
a Boulanger aims at aping Bonaparte, and now the notion 
of a cosmopolitan syndicate takes the place occupied in 
French minds in 1794 by Pitt and Coburg. And we have 
had revelations of judicial or military duplicity and un- 
scrupulousness which revive the recollection of Fouquier- 
Tinville and his Revolutionary Tribunal. 

Some of these scenes held our grandfathers in such 
breathless suspense that even a yeoman in a Norfolk 
village, 1 300 miles from Paris, who had never travelled 
beyond London, consulted the stars to ascertain whether 
or not Robespierre would overturn the Convention. 

My object has been not to point a moral, although 
history is bound to furnish lessons to contemporaries, 
but to give a picture of the time, with its lights and 
shadows, its enthusiasms and its horrors. Fortunately 
it is easy for a foreigner to be impartial, perhaps easier 
for an Englishman than for any other foreigner, for his 
country was never invaded in the wars which arose out 
of the Revolution, a memory which may warp the view 
of the Continental European, nor can he have leanings 
towards the old monarchy which its assistance in the War 
of Independence may inspire in an American. For a 

1 My maternal grandfather. 



PREFACE v vii 

Frenchman impartiality may be declared impossible. His 
politics are governed by his opinion of the Revolution, 
and vice versd. Not only all subsequent but all previous 
French history is judged by him by the Revolution. Add 
,to this a natural pity or admiration for ancestors who 
acted or suffered in that troubled time, and it is easy to 
understand that French historians are royalists or republi- 
cans, Girondins or Jacobins, Robespierrists or Dantonists. 
They cannot get the proper perspective, and they argue 
rather than dissect. For the foreigner, on the other hand, 
the Revolution should be a psychological problem, to be 
as dispassionately studied as the Roman Empire or the 
Norman Conquest. The essential thing is to understand 
the standpoint and sentiments of the actors. The personal 
equation of course necessarily affects all histories, but it 
is for the reader to judge how far I have succeeded in 
preserving the judicial or scientific temper. 

I have been kindly allowed to incorporate articles in 
Chapters VII. and XL from the Scottish Review, in Chapter 
VIII. from the English Historical Review , in Chapter X. from 
the Atlantic Monthly, and in Appendix D from the West- 
minster Review. These portions of the work have been 
more or less enlarged by later researches. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION, AND WHAT 
REMAINS OF IT 

PAGE 

Walls — Gardens — Convents — Colleges — Churches — Palaces — 
Slums — Mansions — Prisons — Hospitals — Streets — Bridges — 
Promenades — Remains — Guillotine sites — Conciergerie — Con- 
dorcet — Street re-naming and re-numbering — Houses with 
celebrated occupants — Paine — Relics, royal and revolutionary . I 

CHAPTER II 

DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 

A centenarian serf — Cloots and his cosmopolites — Americans : 
Paul Jones, Joel Barlow, Col. Swan, &c. — Petitioners for 
Paine's release — Reception of Monroe and other ambassadors 
— Nantucket whalers — More Quakers — Paoli — Mirabeau's 
sister — Suppliants — Boys and girls — A war victim — Saltpetre 
— Tu versus Vous — Negroes — Singing deputations — Masque- 
rades — Goddess of Liberty 51 



CHAPTER III 

THE PARIS COMMUNE 

Records — Elections — Expulsions — Spectators — Deputations — 
Adoptions — Civic baptisms — Re-naming of persons and streets 
— Suppliants — Bye-laws — Victualling — The maximum — Civic 
Lent — Pet animals — Butchers and bakers — Requisitions — 
Iconoclasm — Abjurations of priests and nuns — Treatment of 
Royal Family — Simon and the Dauphin — Guillotine crowds — 
Cemeteries — Weddings — Fate of the Commune . . . ni 



x CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IV 

THE PARIS SECTIONS 

PAGE 

Registers — Organisations — Nomenclature — Civic cards — Recita- 
tions — Prison " Orgies " — Fraternal Dinners — " Tu," not 
"Vous" — Gifts — Revolutionary committees — Arrest of Eng- 
lish — Other arrests — Suburban refuges — Petty tyranny — 
Suppliants — Delation — Twelfth day — Deaf and Dumb — 
Morellet — Episodes — Scarcity — Iconoclasm — Committees dis- 
solved — Exposures and prosecutions — Amnesty — Stage satire . 149 

CHAPTER V 

PARIS DAY BY DAY: JANUARY-JUNE 1794 

Observers of public spirit — Invasion of England, and rumoured 
revolution — Popular meetings — Street groups and talk — Fes- 
tivals — Tricks of tradesmen — Scarcity — Queues — Quacks, 
beggars, and thieves — Sunday and Friday observance — Shirk- 
ing military and sentry service — Arrests and prisons — Suicides 
— Negro emancipation — A boulevard burial — Buffon fils — 
Taciturnity and delation — Pillage — Desecration of graves — 
Drunkenness — Strikes — Wedding feasts — Robespierre's illness 
and rumoured arrest — Gambling — Guillotine scenes — Hebert 
— Danton — Easter — Festival of Supreme Being — Decadi 
Sermons 195 

CHAPTER VI 

LIFE IN PARIS 

Ordinary routine — Advertisements — Apathy or terror — Night- 
mare — Theatres — Festivals — Fine Arts — Academies — Dress — 
Pauperism — Strikes — Assignats — Forced gifts — Inventions — 
Auctions and speculation — Crime — Delation — Heroism . .251 



CHAPTER VII 

AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 

A courtship at Nantes : Villenave and Miss Tasset — Madame 
Roland's Letters to Buzot — Emigre's and their wives or 
mistresses — The poet Roucher to his daughter . . . 287 



CONTENTS xi 

CHAPTER VIII 
THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 

PAGE 

James Watt, jun. — British Club — Jackson — Lord E. Fitzgerald — 
Frost — Madgett — Maxwell — Merry — Oswald — Stephen Sayre 
— Sir R. Smyth — Stone — Yorke 324 

CHAPTER IX 

PRISON DOCUMENTS 

Fouquier Tinville — The Revolutionary Tribunal — Letters, cringing 
and defiant — Desmoulins — Lavoisier — Princess of Monaco — 
Corneille's granddaughter — Sir W. Codrington — Notes of 
Trials — Execution escorts — Charlotte Corday — Intercepted 
letters from and to prisoners 364 



CHAPTER X 

PRISON DOCUMENTS {continued) 
Farewell Letters of Victims of the Guillotine — Fouquier's humanity 384 

CHAPTER XI 

THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 

Duplay household — Habits — Last speech — Insurrection of Com- 
mune — Captured — Guillotined — His notebook — Character . 439 

CHAPTER XII 

THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 

Madame Roland — The"roigne de Mericourt — Reine Audu — 
Regicides — Girondins — Desmoulins — Carnot — Cavaignac — 
David — Santerre — Recantations — Banishments — No remorse 
— Sergent — Sanson — Laflotte — Drouet : Epilogue of the Flight 
to Varennes — Descendants 490 



xii CONTENTS 

APPENDICES 

PAGE 

A. Profanation of Tombs 521 

B. Concordance of Gregorian and Jacobin Calendars . 525 

C. Revolutionary Phrases 527 

D. Corrigenda in Carlyle's "History of the French 

Revolution" 530 

INDEX OF NAMES 541 



PARIS IN 1789-94 



CHAPTER I 

THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION, AND WHAT 
REMAINS OF IT 

Walls — Gardens — Convents — Colleges — Churches — Palaces — Slums — 
Mansions — Prisons — Hospitals — Streets — Bridges — Promenades — 
Remains — Guillotine Sites — Conciergerie — Condorcet — Street re- 
naming and re-numbering — Houses with celebrated occupants — 
Paine — Relics, Royal and Revolutionary 

The Paris of 1789 was very unlike the Paris of the present 
day. Its 600,000 inhabitants l — nearly the same population 
as that of imperial Rome — were quartered more densely 
than nowadays in the central portion, and very sparsely in 
the outlying ones. They were shut in by the walls which, 
not quite completed, had been erected by the revenue 
farmers in order to repress smuggling. Till then every 
street or road leading into the country had a hoarding or 
palisading, with an opening to admit one vehicle at a time, 
and a sentry-box for the collector. The walls, 17 feet 
in height, were the suggestion of the celebrated Lavoisier, 
while the ornamental barriers or collectors' offices were 
the idea of Calonne. 2 These were ninety-six in number, 
and six of them still exist. One is at the northern entrance 
of Pare Monceau — a double ditch in lieu of a wall ran 
alongside the park — and is now the keeper's lodge ; two 
others are in the boulevard Raspail, ,two more in the 
place du Trone, and the sixth in the faubourg St. Martin. 

1 The census of 1801, the first really accurate one, gave 597,000 inhabitants, 
but at the beginning of the Revolution there were probably 600,000. 

2 Mollien, Mimoires. 

A 



2 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Outside the walls was a road with two lines of trees, and 
by that road Louis XVI. returned from Varennes, to avoid 
passing through the city, while inside there was a similar 
avenue in some portions of the circle. Certain religious 
communities, which had enjoyed exemption from octroi 
duties, and some of which had abused the privilege by 
selling commodities not required for their own con- 
sumption, had received compensation for the abolition 
of the privilege. This increased rigour in collecting the 
indirect taxes rendered the revenue farmers so unpopular 
as to contribute in 1794 to their execution in a batch, 
Lavoisier among them. Yet there were still attempts at 
evasion. Mercier speaks of a publican smuggling wine 
into his cellars by a tube 200 feet long passing under the 
wall. He was fined 6000 francs, and this penalty was 
placarded over Paris, but excited sympathy rather than 
reprobation. In 1790, moreover, another publican in the 
faubourg St. Denis was detected in getting wine into his 
back-garden through the adjoining Clos St. Lazare. In 
January 1791 there was a scuffle between smugglers and 
the military. Taxable articles were sometimes flung over 
the wall, and there were legends of underground passages 
through which even cattle could pass. In May 1791, 
indeed, the octroi was abolished, the Assembly ordering 
the suspension of the work on the uncompleted portion 
of the walls and the sale of the materials ; but fiscal 
necessities in 1798 led to the revival of the impost, and 
when Paris was threatened with famine the walls served 
to prevent provisions from being sent out to the equally 
straitened suburbs. In January 1794 a woman was de- 
tected in slipping five loaves outwards through a breach 
in the walls. These contraband acts were possible, because 
between the old boulevards, marking the site of the walls 
demolished by Louis XIV., and the revenue farmers' wall, 
now the line of outer boulevards, were large tracts of fields 
and gardens. 1 Even up to 1859, when that wall was 

1 Beyond the wall a contemporary writer speaks of "a charming variety of 
vine-clad hills, fields, woods, and lawns." 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 3 

removed, there was a belt of vacant ground, often a kind of 
No Man's land, for though the Parisians had been gradually 
filling up the space between the wall and the fortifications 
of 1840 there had been no inducement, but the reverse, to 
erect houses just within the octroi. For an opposite 
reason the space immediately beyond the barriers was 
studded with houses, half-a-million of untaxed people 
inhabiting the space between the barriers and the forti- 
fications. In 1789 the houses were tolerably continuous, 
indeed, for a certain range beyond the boulevards, and a 
few transverse streets had been opened in the faubourgs, 
but buildings then became straggling, with large spaces of 
ground at the back. The retired grocer with whom Thomas 
Paine lodged in 1793 in the faubourg St. Denis had, for 
instance, more than an acre of land, well stocked with fruit 
trees, and the premises resembled, as indeed they must 
originally have been, an old farmhouse. Valant, an ex- 
priest, who in 1798 opened a boarding-school in the same 
premises, announced as an inducement to parents that 
every boy had a plot of garden. Napoleon and his fellow 
students at Brienne had also had their separate gardens, 
which was easily arranged in a country town, but was of 
course less common inside Paris. The Grange Bateliere, 
though only just beyond the boulevard, was still a farm- 
house. In the faubourg du Temple and the faubourg St. 
Antoine there were scarcely any houses, and the nursery- 
men in the latter quarter, on the 6th July 1792, presented 
the Assembly with a pyramid of roses, while the south- 
west of the Champs Elysees was still real country. 
Even on the inner side of the boulevards, moreover, 
there were mansions provided not only with gardens 
but with ditches, and on the 15th November 1790 a 
crowd assembled to fill up the ditches of M. de Mont- 
morency, which were considered both an obstruction 
and an encroachment. Beaumarchais had one of the 
most spacious private gardens in Paris, one side of it 
looking on the Bastille, the demolition of which im- 
proved the view. 



4 PARIS IN 1789-94 

There were, too, about 140 monastic establishments, 1 
none probably without a garden, and many possessing 
spacious grounds. These establishments studded the south 
side of the Seine, but even on the north they occupied a 
considerable area. The Jacobins, in the rue St. Honore, 
whose chapel was to become the Jacobin club, had a large 
back-garden. The Conceptionists and the Capucins almost 
joined them, but the latter had a century before lost the 
greater part of their grounds, to make way for the place 
des Conquetes, now the place Vendome. Their building, 
however, remained till 1805. The gardens of both these 
communities extended to the boulevard. Across the street 
were the Assumptionists, whose chapel still exists, the con- 
vent, till its demolition in 1899, being the laboratory of the 
Ministry of Finance. The Feuillants were close by, at the 
back of the Manege or riding-school, where the Assembly 
met in October 1789 on quitting Versailles, taking possession 
of the monastery to serve as its committee rooms. A little 
to the north-east were the nuns of St. Thomas, on whose 
site the Bourse now stands. Adjoining, to the south of 
them, were the Augustinians or Petits Peres. Of their 
monastery and spacious grounds, through which the rue 
de la Banque was made in 1846, the church alone remains, 
re-named Notre Dame des Victoires in 1836 because the 
priest, Dufriche des Genettes, believed himself to have 
received during mass an injunction from the Virgin that it 
should be dedicated to her. But Louis XIII. had originally 
given it that name, in celebration of victories over the 
Huguenots. At a short distance were the Oratorians, in 
whose chapel Talleyrand and Gobel consecrated the first 
two constitutional bishops. Since 181 1 it has been a 
Protestant church. The Assumptionists, Capucins, and 
Feuillants all bordered on the Tuileries gardens, or on the 
Manege. 

The Benedictins, or Blancs-Manteaux, were farther east ; 

1 There are now about 50. Verniquet's plan of Paris of 1 79 1 gives 68 mon- 
asteries and 73 convents, but several of these were prisons or hospitals. On 
the other hand, several of the 29 hospitals were virtually convents. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 5 

their church remains, but their monastery has been annexed 
to the Mont de Piete. Close by, in the place Royale (now 
place des Vosges), were the Minimes, whose 17,000 books 
formed one of the finest libraries in Paris ; their monas- 
tery is now a barrack. The Celestins had recently been 
evacuated and was about to be utilised as a blind asylum ; 
their chapel contained the tomb of Anne of Burgundy, 
wife of the Regent Duke of Bedford. A barrack now 
covers the site, but her statue, placed on her tomb by 
her brother, the good Duke John of Burgundy, is pre- 
served at the Louvre. The Carmelites or Billettes, so 
called because the previous occupants of the monastery 
wore small scapulars termed billettes, were in what is now 
the rue des Archives. Their chapel, where the Academy 
in its early years held masses for deceased members, has 
been since 1809 a Lutheran church, and their cloisters 
are attached to an elementary school. The Peres de la 
Merci, vestiges of whose monastery still exist, were likewise 
in the present rue des Archives. There were also Car- 
melite nuns in the adjoining rue Beaubourg. The abbey 
of St. Antoine, which gave its name to a quarter of the 
city, is now a hospital, and the chapel of the Visitandines 
in the rue St. Antoine is a Protestant church retaining 
the original name of St. Marie. The English Conceptionist 
nuns were a short distance beyond the Bastille, and were 
not a little terrified when that fortress was attacked. Nor 
must I forget the abbey of St. Martin, now the Arts et 
Metiers, the chapel turned into a machine-room, and the 
cells, so far as they have not been demolished, into a 
museum. On the outskirts of the city was St. Lazare, 
where St. Vincent de Paul was buried, with a large field 
on the north of it. When the monks who there took 
charge of young delinquents were expelled, their places 
being taken by political suspects, as depicted by Delaroche 
in his famous picture of the last batch of the guillotined, 
the saint's heart in its silver casket was smuggled out in 
a volume of " Lives of the Saints," hollowed out for the 
purpose, and after preservation in Italy and at Lyons is 



6 PARIS IN 1789-94 

now at the chapel in the rue de Sevres. Just on the 
opposite side of the street stood the Filles-Dieu or Gray 
Sisters convent, which in 1816 became the maison-de- 
sante Dubois, a hospital for paying patients. It was de- 
molished in 1853, when the boulevard de Strasbourg was 
made, the establishment being removed to No. 200 in the 
same street. The R6collets monastery, faubourg St. Lau- 
rent, used during the Revolution for a spinning-factory, 
and afterwards converted into a military hospital, is about 
to make way for a square. In the same neighbourhood, 
standing in the faubourg St. Martin, was the Enfant J£sus 
convent. 

Turning back towards the then unfinished Madeleine, 
there was on the north, in what is now the rue Caumartin, 
a newly erected Capucin monastery, the chapel of which 
became a printing office. 1 In 1803 it was converted into a 
college, and it is now the lycee Condorcet. Behind the 
Madeleine was a Benedictine nunnery with spacious 
grounds, that quarter of Paris being called the Ville 
l'Ev£que. 

I have not spoken of the Nouvelles Catholiques, or 
asylum of converts from Protestantism, in the rue St. 
Anne, 2 the chapel of which is said still to exist at 10 rue 
St. Roch ; the Daughters of Calvary, south-east of the 
Temple ; another community of Minimes in the rue St. 
Antoine ; the Daughters of the Cross and the St. Marguerite 
nuns in the adjoining faubourg ; the Hospitalieres of 
Roquette, the site till recently occupied by a prison where 
the Commune massacred the hostages in 1871 ; or Notre 
Dame de Bon-Secours, which was close by. In the same 
quarter was the nunnery of Picpus, named from a village 
said to have been tormented with a certain parasite and 
therefore named 1 pique puce t an etymology, however, which is 
dubious. The Franciscans also had a monastery there. 
Nearly or quite outside the walls were the famous Benedic- 
tine nunnery of Montmartre and the convent of Chaillot. 
Montmartre was still a village, clustering round the old 

1 See p. 282. 2 See English Historical Review, April 1898. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 7 

church and the convent. The former is still standing, 
but the latter has disappeared, except some vestiges in the 
place Ravignan, and in the autumn of 1896, under a pent- 
house at No. 28, the burial crypt was discovered. Chaillot, 
to which Mary of Modena retired on the death of James II. 
and where she was buried, occupied the site of the present 
Trocadero, a building erected in 1878, up to which time 
Chaillot and Longchamp had still a village look and 
were only partially built upon. Close by was a Minimite 
monastery. 

But on the south of the Seine monastic establishments 
were, considering the smaller area, much more numerous 
and far exceeded the space occupied by private houses. 
First and foremost was "L'Abbaye" — the abbey par excel- 
lence — that of the Benedictines in St. Germain des Pres. 
It had produced men of great erudition ; within its walls 
were also composed the realistic romances of that untract- 
able monk the abbe Prevost. Out of the same portals 
proceeded devotion and licentiousness. The abbey was 
world-famous for its 50,000 books and 7000 manuscripts, 
destined, alas, to destruction, not from Jacobin fanaticism, 
but because the building was used in 1794 for a saltpetre 
factory, and an accidental fire destroyed all but the church. 
The abbey prison, a detached building at one corner, was 
the scene of the fearful massacres of September 1792. A 
drawing in Prudhomme's Revolutions de Paris represents 
the victims as being slaughtered outside the gate, the 
murderers there waiting for them, but in the letterpress 
the corpses are said to have been heaped up in the court, 
where it seems likely that most at least of the butchery took 
place. The prison was demolished in 1854. The abbey 
stood apart, but many other establishments were grouped 
together, forming quite a monastic enclave. Thus, in the 
rue and faubourg St. Jacques the Visitandines, the Dames 
de la Providence, the English Benedictines, the Val-de- 
Grace (now a military hospital), and the Capucins were all 
in a line. The English Benedictines had charge of the 
body of James II., pending the long-expected translation 



8 PARIS IN 1789-94 

to Westminster Abbey. In their petition to the National 
Assembly for exemption from suppression they adroitly 
cited this deposit : — 

The church of the English Benedictines contains the ashes of a 
king whose misfortunes were the glory, so to speak, of France. It 
would seem that all citizens of all classes should be interested in 
the preservation of an establishment which by the deposit it con- 
tains perpetuates in the eyes of all Europe the recollection of 
French generosity. 1 

The tomb, alas, was destined to be desecrated for the sake 
of lead for gunpowder, and the body to disappear. 2 Other 
British communities were in the neighbourhood. There 
were the Austin nuns, whom Dr. Johnson had visited in 
1775, and where Georges Sand was later on to be edu- 
cated ; it was not demolished till 1859, when its spacious 
grounds were required for the rue Monge. There were the 
British Benedictine nuns in the rue de l'Alouette, a name 
commemorating the time when larks nestled in ground now 
covered with bricks and mortar. 

To return to French monasteries, there were the Corde- 
liers, whose refectory became the headquarters of a club 
next in importance to the Jacobins. It is now a medical 
museum, the rest of the building having disappeared. 
There were also Cordeliere nuns whose convent has be- 
come the Lourcine hospital. There was the monastery of 
the Petits Augustins, now the School of Fine Arts, and that 
of the Carthusians, whose garden, at one time added to the 
Luxembourg, now belongs to the Faculty of Medicine. 
There were Barefooted Carmelites and Carmelite nuns, 
with whom the Duchesse de la Valliere took refuge, Lebrun 
painting her in their church as Mary Magdalen. St. Joseph 
Bellechasse, Pentemont, a fashionable boarding-school, 3 
the chapel now a Protestant church and the rest of the 

1 D. xix. 51. 2 See p. 522. 

1 This was the school in which Jefferson placed his daughter Martha, and from 
which he was obliged to remove her on her hankering to become a nun. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 9 

building a barrack, Visitandines, Recollettes, and Carme- 
lites, clustered between the Invalides and the Luxembourg. 
The Carmelite monastery, now the Catholic Institute or 
University, was another of the scenes of the September 
massacres. Of ■ St. Genevieve's abbey the tower alone 
remains, as part of the lycee Henry IV. The Cluny 
monastery is now the museum of that name. The Halle- 
aux-Vins covers the site of St. Victor's abbey, while the 
Bernardin monastery, rue de Poitou, founded by an 
Englishman, Stephen of Lexington, in 1244, is now a 
fire-brigade station. The Filles de la Charite is, or was 
till recently, the quarters of the Academy of Medicine. 
Port Royal, less interesting in its associations than the 
surburban branch so ruthlessly razed by Louis XIV., be- 
came a revolutionary prison, known as Port Libre or la 
Bourbe, for the street, or rather 'country road, in which 
it stood was so muddy as to have been named rue de la 
Bourbe. The Madelonnettes, or Notre Dame de la Charite, 
was also a political prison. Then there were the Visitandines, 
Ursulines, Feuillantines, Dominicaines, the Abbaye-au-Bois, 
nuns of the Holy Sacrament, Our Lady of Consolation, 
Daughters of St. Genevieve or Miramiones, St. Pelagie — a 
Magdalen hospital likewise converted into a prison and 
continued as such till 1898 — Ladies of the Congregation, 
Dames St. Thomas, and the Good Shepherd, as also 
Premonstrant monks, Theatins, Mathurins, and Christian 
Brothers. Yet up to the very eve of the Revolution the 
number of communities had been undergoing a slight 
reduction, for no new ones were founded, and some died 
out or were closed on account of suspected Jansenism. 
The Revolution thus repeated on a larger scale what had 
been done by the old monarchy. Many of these com- 
munities, on both sides of the Seine, have given their 
names to streets or boulevards, but have otherwise left 
no trace. 

When Dr. Lister visited Paris in 1698 numerous con- 
vent gardens were open to well-dressed people, but this had 
ceased to be the case, especially as some had been reduced 



io PARIS IN 1789-94 

in size, the rise of rents having induced the religious congre- 
gations to line the streets on which they bordered with 
shops and dwelling-houses. These were the more in 
request as conventual precincts were exempt from the 
restrictions of the trade guilds, and in some cases afforded 
the privilege of sanctuary. Lister speaks of the Carthusians' 
garden as large and park-like, of the Celestins' as very fine 
and spacious, and of St. Genevieve as having a terrace sur- 
passing in length and breadth anything of the kind in 
Paris. However curtailed in some cases, convent grounds 
must still have been tolerably spacious, for the cloistered 
orders were bound to have plenty of air within their im- 
passable walls, and three-fourths of the nunneries were 
educational, so that playgrounds were indispensable. They 
moreover took adult boarders. Old maids scarcely existed, 
indeed, in those days, for unmarried girls usually took the 
veil, but widows without children, or whose children were all 
settled in life, hired rooms in nunneries. Wives or daughters 
who had misbehaved, or were unmanageable, were likewise 
relegated to convents, just as husbands or sons were sent to 
the Bastille and other fortresses. 1 Such was the paternal 
government, similar to that still existing in Russia, which 
France then possessed. But it is only fair to say that 
applications for domestic discipline underwent careful 
inquiry before detention was ordered. The convents were 
thus female Bastilles or literally houses of correction, and 
the nuns had not even the power of refusing to admit 
these mauvais sujets. In extreme cases, however, they 
appealed to the Government to be released from trouble- 
some charges. The nunnery des Alloix at Limoges, 
where the elder Mirabeau, the "friend of man," had 
quartered his wife, obtained an order for her departure, 

1 There were also lodginghouse-prisons (pensions deforce), and Saint -Just, at 
nineteen years of age, in 1 786-87, was an inmate for 1 six months of one of 
these, in the place du Trone, at the instance and expense of his mother, from 
whom he had abstracted some silver articles, in order to make his way to 
Paris [Revolution Francaise, February 1 897). Minors can still, under certain 
regulations, be sent to prison by parents or guardians. Thus the lettre de cachet 
is not altogether extinct. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION n 

and she had to find another convent. On complaining to 
the Government of her semi-incarceration, she was told 
that a convent was the proper place for a woman who could 
not live with her husband. 1 The future Madame Roland, 
who had been educated by the Dames de la Congregation, 
near the Pantheon, took refuge with them for two months in 
1779 when twenty-three years of age as the only way of goad- 
ing the vacillating^ Roland into marrying her. 2 These lone 
or naughty women of course required recreation grounds. 

If convents were thus numerous south of the Seine, 
colleges were still more so, for it was then even more than 
now "the Latin quarter." There was the Sorbonne, as it 
existed till a few years ago, the chapel alone now remain- 
ing unaltered. There youths destined to be prominent 
revolutionists received prizes at the annual competition 
of Paris colleges. Lavoisier took the second prize for a 
French oration in 1760. Louis Francois Maximilien Marie 
Isidore de Robespierre — mark the flush of Christian names 
and the aristocratic particle — a student at Louis-le-Grand, 
in 1775 carried off three first prizes — for Latin verse, Latin 
translation, and Greek translation. In 1778 Andre - Chenier, 
of Navarre College, had the first prize for a French oration, 
and an accessit for a Latin translation, while Lucien Simplice 
Camille Benoit des Moulins — Camille Desmoulins is scarcely 
recognisable under this long name — had an accessit for a 
Latin oration. I may also mention that La Harpe, destined 
to be enthusiastic for the Revolution but ultimately to 
stigmatise it, took the grand prize in 1765 for his Latin 
oration, besides the first prize for Greek translation, the 
second prize for Latin verse, and an accessit for a French 
oration. Harcourt College must have been very proud of 
this student, the best of whose many compositions was 
that pretended prophecy of the Reign of Terror, Cazotte's 
vision. 

Colleges clustered round the Sorbonne, some training 
young men for the priesthood, but most of them open also 
to the laity. There was the College des Quatre Nations, so 
1 O. 1, 408. 2 See p. 308. 



12 PARIS IN 1789-94 

called because founded by Mazarin for the "nations" of 
Pignerol, Flanders, Roussillon, and Alsace, which in 1806, 
as the Palais Mazarin, became the seat of the Institute ; it 
had previously assembled at the Louvre. Mazarin's tomb, 
originally at the college, must be looked for at Versailles. 
There was Du Plessis College, where Lafayette and Ana- 
charsis Cloots were educated, destined till it fell into ruins 
to serve as the Normal School. The college Louis-le- 
Grand now covers the site. There was the college Har- 
court, where Talleyrand was a student, the college Mon- 
taigu, where Saint-Just as well as Desmoulins studied, the 
college Navarre (the Polytechnic School occupies the site), 
the colleges La Marche, Cardinal Lemoine, Grassins, and 
Lisieux. The Irish had two seminaries, the Lombards — 
now occupied by workshops and the chapel by a Catholic 
lecture-room — and the Cheval Vert ; the English seminary 
was in the rue des Postes, now rue Lhomond ; the Scotch 
College, next door to the Austin nunnery, is now let for 
a private school. The brain of James II. was dug up there 
in 1885 in excavating for a drainpipe. The great seminary 
of St. Sulpice stood a little to the north of the present 
building, on what is now a square. It was demolished 
in 1800, and rebuilt on the site of the Christian Doctrine 
convent. The Foreign Missions seminary, where the Irish 
priest Edgeworth, Louis XVI.'s confessor, was a resident, 
still exists in the rue du Bac. St. Magloire seminary 
boasted, as the deaf and dumb asylum which succeeded it 
still boasts, of possessing in its garden the oldest and finest 
elm in Paris, planted, according to tradition, by the great 
Sully in 1660, but as others think by the Oratorians on first 
settling there in 1572. It is 150 feet high, and has a girth 
at the base of 18 feet. 

This multiplicity of colleges, thirty-four in all, was not 
an unmixed benefit. More than a century before, a cor- 
respondent of Colbert's had described them as nurseries of 
chicane, producing lawyers, registrars, priests, and monks, 
whereas they might be converted into commercial schools 
and turn out good navigators and merchants. It is certain 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 13 

that the Revolution was hastened and intensified by the 
numbers of young men who had had a college education, 
and then, scorning trade or agriculture, found no scope 
under a monarchy which reserved the best posts for the 
nobility. By giving scholarships to clever and ambitious 
youths the monarchy undermined itself. 

Paris was also studded with churches, somewhat like 
London before the Great Fire, or Norwich and York at the 
present day. There were forty-eight parish churches, be- 
sides the numerous monastic chapels, and the parishes were 
so irregular in size and shape that a rearrangement was 
becoming urgent The cite, or island on which Notre 
Dame stands, had five churches, which have all disap- 
peared. St. Philippe du Roule stood quite in the country. 
The Madeleine and Pantheon were in course of erection. 
The former was for a time the meeting-place of the Roule 
section, and was next used for making saltpetre. The 
Pantheon in August 1792 was suggested for the sittings of 
the Convention, but the Tuileries were preferred. Had it 
obtained the preference the Convention might have been 
less at the mercy of Jacobin mobs. 

We must not suppose that the secularisation of 
churches, carried on so extensively not only in Paris 
but throughout France, gave a great shock to Catholic 
feeling. The electoral meetings of 1789, when no hostility 
had yet broken out against Catholicism, were all held in 
churches or convent chapels, the only buildings, indeed, 
available for large gatherings. In Catholic eyes a church 
loses its character of sanctity when the objects of ritual 
have been temporarily or permanently removed. The 
bells, it was ordered in June 179 1, should be melted down 
for coinage into copper money. 

As for palaces, the Duke of Orleans occupied that part 
of the Palais Royal which was not let out by him. The 
Luxembourg was assigned to Monsieur, the future Louis 
XVIII., and the Due de Bourbon inhabited the palace 
across the river which, with a new Grecian frontage, still 
bears his name. The Louvre was already used for a 



i 4 PARIS IN 1789-94 

picture gallery, the biennial exhibitions being held there. 
The royal printing office was also there, and since 1770 
the Com^die Francaise had been installed there, while in 
two other halls theatrical or musical entertainments were 
occasionally held. The adjoining Tuileries had not been 
a royal residence since 1743. The Academies met at the 
Louvre, and both there and at the Tuileries certain curators 
or officials had apartments, while the other rooms were 
granted for life to aristocratic families, frequently to 
widows, in straitened circumstances, as at Hampton Court 
and Kensington in England. There was a scramble for 
these lodgings, and some were bespoken or promised before 
they fell vacant. Successive life tenants of the Tuileries 
had for eighty years made themselves comfortable by 
putting up partitions and making doorways^ but some of 
them had nevertheless to pass through their neighbours' 
kitchens for ingress or egress. All had abruptly to clear 
out on the 6th October 1789, when the royal family 
arrived from Versailles. Protests were unavailing. A com- 
plete clearance was made, some tenants having quarters 
found for them in various public edifices, and others being 
promised pecuniary compensation. 

As for the slums surrounding the Tuileries, Baron 
Haussmann, who in 1852-54 swept them away, thus 
describes them : — 

The first section of the rue de Rivoli, bordering on the Tuileries 
gardens, stopped short at the Pavilion de Marsan and the passage 
Delorme. Beyond was a noisome quarter consisting of dingy houses 
intersected by narrow alleys, which extended from the rue St. Honore 
to the place du Carrousel, most of which was choked up by it. It 
covered nearly the whole of the present surface of the place du Palais 
Royal, and then continued uninterruptedly alongside the Louvre, 
which it hemmed in on the west and north up to the so-called place 
de la Colonnade, likewise obstructed by dingy buildings. 1 

A writer in the Revue des Deux Mondes 2 gives a more 
vivid picture : — 

Grey-haired men remember what the place du Carrousel was 
1 Memoires, t. 3. a Vol. cxliii. p. 816. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 15 

before the Second Empire. . . . There was scarcely in all Paris 
a more seething or more picturesque slum. . . . You saw dingy 
hovels, the ruins of a church, a riding-school, rows of lime-trees, 
stone-masons' yards, dingy hotels where, in sight of the Tuileries 
and the Ministries, young embassy attaches and budding lawyers 
came to lodge. I have never understood how there was room for 
all this and yet space for waste ground. In the hovels swarmed 
bird-sellers, brokers, and shabby wineshops, and in the waste ground 
jugglers and dentists, quacks and dog-gelders. Everywhere a sprink- 
ling of beggars a la Callot. It was a great Cour des Miracles 

In these alleys Marie Antoinette and her attendant lost 
themselves on the night of the flight of 1791, when they 
slipped into the shade to avoid Lafayette's carriage, and 
were thus delayed a few minutes, though it is not the fact 
that they wandered into the rue du Bac, for how could 
they have passed under the Louvre gallery, which con- 
nected the two palaces, and crossed the bridge without 
seeing where they were going? The Tuileries court was 
encumbered with hawkers' stalls, which were not cleared 
away till the Consulate, and even Napoleon shrank from 
the expense of uniting the Tuileries and Louvre. 

Surrounded on the Carrousel or east side by mansions, 
barracks, guard-house, and stalls, on the north by a wall 
shutting off the gardens, riding-school, and stables from 
the backs of the monasteries and houses in the rue St. 
Honored and having on the south a terrace flanking the 
river, without any roadway between, the Tuileries was 
scarcely visible from the streets. Only the roofs and the 
tops of trees could be discerned. Where the rue de 
Rivoli now skirts the garden, was a grassy avenue attached 
to the riding-school, which had been leased to private 
speculators. 

Though the Court had been for a century at Versailles 
and courtiers mostly lived there, many aristocratic families 
had retained or acquired residences in Paris, for its theatres 
made it the centre of fashionable life. Some of these man- 
sions, more or less transformed, still remain, or till recently 
remained, converted into public institutions. Witness the 



16 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Archives, the adjoining Ecole des Chartes and Imprimerie 
Nationale, the Carnavalet Museum (Madame de Sevignd's 
house), the Bank of France (formerly the mansion of the 
Due de la Vrilliere), the Credit Foncier, the Comptoir 
d'Escompte, and till 1877 the Post Office. Simultaneously 
with this last building disappeared the house inhabited by 
Rousseau, after whom the street was named. Other man- 
sions have been turned into flats or workshops, and regret 
is occasionally expressed at their mutilation or demolition. 
The gardens which they originally possessed have, of 
course, long disappeared. The Hotel de Sens, the former 
residence of the archbishops of that see, was thus recently 
threatened with destruction. The Pavilion de Hanovre, 
Christofle's jewellery shop, is the sole vestige of Marshal 
(the roue) Richelieu's mansion. It stood at one corner of 
his spacious grounds, and was so nicknamed by the popu- 
lace in the belief that he had built it with a bribe from 
the defeated Duke of Cumberland for the convention of 
Klosterzeven in 1757, and Richelieu had cynically accepted 
the name. His mansion, entered by the rue Neuve St. 
Augustin at its junction with the rue d'Antin, was sold 
by his widow in 1792 to Cheradame, a paving contractor, 
and became an hotel. The so-called "victims' balls," the 
attendants at which had had relatives guillotined, or had 
themselves been imprisoned, were held there in 1795. The 
garden did not wholly disappear till 1830. 

The Archbishop's palace, which adjoined Notre Dame, 
and where the Assembly sat for the first week after quitting 
Versailles, was converted into a prison hospital on the 
abjuration of Bishop Gobel, and from April to July 1794 
was crowded with inmates, sometimes numbering as many 
as 227, though there were only 221 beds. The large hall 
used for ordinations, the meeting-place of the Paris 
electors, became the hall of the hospital. Again an 
episcopal residence on the restoration of Catholicism, 
it was pillaged and burnt down by the mob in 1831. 
The Hotel des Fermes, the spacious building belonging 
to the revenue farmers — Chancellor Siguier built it in 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 17 

161 2, the famous Prince Eugene was born there, and 
the Academy for a time met there, but it had been re- 
built in 1780 — existed, latterly used for a printing and 
railway goods office, till 1877. Lavoisier and his fellow 
revenue farmers were prisoners there, until removed to 
the Conciergerie for trial. 

The Bourse was held in the garden of the old building 
of the East India Company in the rue Vivienne. It was 
closed during the Terror, when the term agioteur was a 
passport to the guillotine ; but at the end of 1795 specu- 
lators assembled on the steps north of the Palais Royal, 
and shortly afterwards they found quarters till 1809, first 
in the church and then in the sacristy of the Petits Peres 
or Notre Dame des Victoires. The Opera from 1781 till 
1794 stood at the north-east of the porte St. Martin, and 
then till 1820 on what is now the place Louvois, in front 
of the Bibliotheque Nationale. 

As to prisons, there was the Bastille, which, reserved 
for a few aristocratic or literary offenders, was little feared, 
as Mercier tells us, by the populace. The Chatelet, at the 
corner of the Pont-au-Change, to which the Morgue was 
attached, excited much greater dread. This has entirely 
disappeared. La Force, named from a former owner, 
but so suitably named for a place of forcible detention, 
was assigned to debtors, and there the Earl of Massareene, 
an Irish peer, spent eight of his nineteen years of in- 
carceration. 1 The adjoining Petite Force was allotted to 
loose women, as also were St. Pelagie, Salpetriere, and 
the Madelonnettes. 

The hospitals, with the exception of the Hotel Dieu, 2 
close by Notre Dame, were in the faubourgs, and stood 
almost in the country. St. Louis was near the faubourg 
St. Martin, 3 la Pitie in the faubourg St. Victor, the 
Foundling Asylum, now St. Eugenie, in the faubourg 

1 See my " Englishmen in the French Revolution." 

2 Re-named Hospice de l'Humanite. 

3 The small cemetery assigned to Protestants, natives or foreigners, adjoined 
it, in what is now the rue de?. Ecluses St. Martin. 

B 



1 8 PARIS IN 1789-94 

St. Antoine, and the Cochin Hospital in the faubourg St. 
Jacques. The Beaujon hospital was then an orphanage. 
Another Foundling Asylum, where Rousseau got rid of his 
children, was in the Cite, near Notre Dame. The Quinze- 
Vingts, a hospital the name of which indicated 300 beds, 
was in the rue Charenton, beyond the Bastille. 

Considering the large area occupied by the monasteries, 
the colleges, the churches, the Bastille and other prisons, 
the cemeteries (recently closed, the Innocents' cemetery 
being turned in 1786 into a public garden), the promenades, 
of which we have yet to speak, and the tracts of garden 
ground, it is not surprising to find that a great part of Paris 
consisted of narrow and densely-peopled streets, with pro- 
jecting upper stories, gables, and signboards. Thiebault, 
one of Napoleon's generals, tells us that on first entering 
Paris in 1777 at the age of seven, and on revisiting it seven 
years later, the faubourg St. Jacques and the centre of the 
city were really horrible. 1 Even the main streets were 
narrow and winding. The working class were cooped up 
in alleys without a ray of sunshine, and 100,000 of them 
were lodged in cellars by the river-side, always damp and 
occasionally flooded, so that in the middle of the night the 
miserable occupants had to drag their pallets out into the 
rain or mud. Slums surrounded the Chatelet. These 
places were doubtless the dwellings, I will not say homes, 
of the Terrorist mobs, the Convention sitting at the Tuileries 
being within easy reach. The streets, moreover, were 
filthy, and the shops were low and dim, almost bare of 
ornament. From the butchers' shops issued streams of 
gore, which in summer were a source of infection. Thus 
accustomed to the sight of blood, the Parisians were the 
less shocked at the carnage of the guillotine. Several of 
the bridges had recently been cleared of houses, but some 
still stood on the Pont Neuf, for in 1790 the Pont Neuf 
section claimed them as within its bounds. CElsner, a 
German, who was in Paris from February to August 1792, 
speaks of the streets as so narrow and the houses as so 

1 MhnoireS) i. 23, 140. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 19 

lofty that the sky could be seen only from the fifth story. 
Carlyle's impression in 1824 would have been doubly true 
in 1789, for many improvements had in the meantime been 
made : " With few exceptions the streets are narrow, 
crowded, and unclean ; the kennel (sic) in the middle, 
and a lamp hanging over it here and there on a rope from 
side to side ; there are no footpaths." 

The Cite proper, or island, was, on the north of Notre 
Dame, a network of gloomy alleys, never penetrated by the 
sun, some too narrow for vehicles to traverse. Even before 
the Revolution there had been a scheme for improving it, 
and in the spring of 1794 the Commune was recommended 
to undertake the work, on the ground that the putrid wells 
were impregnated with saltpetre, which would be very 
serviceable, that employment would thus be provided for 
artisans, and that the operation would be remunerative. 
Nothing, however, was then done, whereas unfortunately in 
our days " improvement " has gone so far that the effect of 
Notre Dame is grievously impaired by a wide square and 
streets of lofty commonplace houses. 

About a hundred persons, it was calculated, were 
annually crushed by vehicles, while multitudes were be- 
spattered with mud from the gutters (Carlyle's "kennels" 
or channels), flung from the horses' hoofs or carriage 
wheels. 1 " Nobody but mean people walk in Paris," 
said Johnson rather ungrammatically in 1776. "Those 
who cannot afford carriages," wrote Dr. Moore in 
1789, "skulk behind the pillars" — the domes placed 
against the houses to protect them from vehicles — "or 
run into the shops, to avoid being crushed by the coaches, 
which are driven as near the wall as the coachman 
pleases." But during the Terror private carriages almost 
disappeared, horses being frequently confiscated for the 
use of the army, and even cabs were less numerous, so 
that the danger to pedestrians was sensibly diminished. 
An anonymous pamphlet of 1784 had advocated the 

1 At night pedestrians were liable to be soused by unsavoury liquids thrown 
from upstair windows without the preliminary warning of " gare Feau" 



20 PARIS IN 1789-94 

introduction of footpaths, so that children, as in London, 
might not be shut up indoors, but might safely play in the 
streets. The homes, it urged, would thus become unnecessary. 
In 1793 it was ordered that all new streets should have 
foot - pavements, but this seems to have remained a dead 
letter. In 1802 footpaths were again advocated by Arthur 
Dillon, a Neapolitan engineer, of Irish descent, and a few 
streets were provided with them, but they were raised 
inconveniently high above the level of the street, and there 
was no pavement but simply a "curb." As late as the 
24th December 1823 an ordinance treated footpaths as a 
luxury at the option of house-proprietors. Hence they 
were not styled trottoirs but barrttres, indicating that their 
object was to protect houses from vehicles, rather than to 
accommodate pedestrians, and their width was limited to 
a metre and a half. The same ordinance prohibited pro- 
jecting signs or rain-pipes. 

Though described by Horace Walpole as " the beastliest 
town in the universe," Paris, with all its drawbacks, was 
undoubtedly the capital of Europe. It attracted visitors 
from all nations, and it set the fashions to the world. Dolls 
were dressed up in the numerous dressmakers' shops, then 
on the ground floor, with the work-girls to be seen through 
the windows, and were sent all over the Continent, and even 
to America, as models. Marie Antoinette, when going in 
procession through Paris, would look down and give a 
friendly smile to her dressmaker, Mile. Bertin, with whom 
at Versailles she discussed the fashions. English bonnets, 
however, had superseded the pyramids of hair which had 
occasioned such trouble and inconvenience. 

The great centre of traffic — and we may judge by this 
how the axis of Paris has since shifted — was the Pont 
Neuf, a title which had become a misnomer, but ap- 
propriate enough in 1604, when L'Etoile, the French 
Pepys, said of its deceased builder Marchand that he had 
" gone to construct bridges in the other world." Along 
with the Pont Royal it enjoyed the advantage of foot- 
pavements. It could have undergone but little alteration 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 21 

in 1824, when Carlyle wrote to Miss Welsh, his future 
wife — l< Jugglers, and quacks, and cooks, and barbers, and 
dandies, and gulls, and sharpers were racketing away with 
a deafening hum at their manifold pursuits." If, after 
being posted there a few days, private detectives did not 
see the man they wanted, they knew that he was not in 
Paris. There crimps by every sort of trickery recruited 
for the army, and there an Englishman won a bet that for 
two hours he would offer new six-franc pieces for twenty- 
four sous, or one-fifth of their value, without disposing of 
200 of them. In point of fact his only customer was a 
woman who took three, on the chance of their not being 
counterfeit. The statue of Henry IV., near the centre of 
the bridge, before which the mob in 1789 forced aristocrats 
to descend from their carriages and kneel, was pulled down 
in 1792 and melted for cannon. There were only six other 
bridges, viz., the Pont-au-Change and the Pont Notre 
Dame, leading to the Cite, two from the Cite to the south 
of the Seine, and two connecting the isle St. Louis with 
the banks on each side. The two islands were uncon- 
nected by bridges, or rather the three, for there was then 
also the isle Louvier, which has since become part of the 
north bank. The isle St. Louis had been planted with 
trees about 1632 by Christofle Marie, who built at his own 
expense the bridge named after him, connecting the island 
with the north bank, and these were the first lines of trees 
which Paris had seen. A second line was shortly after- 
wards planted below Pont Neuf. 

One great resort of visitors and loungers was the Palais 
Royal. This, with its gardens, had only recently assumed 
their present form. The Duke of Orleans, then Due de 
Chartres, the future citizen Egalite, heedless of the outcry 
against him, had in 1780 erected a new palace, the 
colonnades of which not only reduced the size of the 
garden, but deprived the inhabitants of the adjoining 
streets of their view and of access to it from the backs 
of their houses. The garden, previously the resort of good 
company, had become the most disreputable promenade 



22 PARIS IN 1789-94 

in Paris, yet all strangers hurried thither to see, if not to 
share in, the vices of the capital. There was much com- 
plaint of pocket-picking, of clandestine gaming-houses, 
and of the sale of obscene books. A circus stood in the 
centre. Under the colonnades were cafes, gaming-houses, 
reading-rooms, and shops of every description. Well 
might Prince Henry of Prussia say of the place in 1784, 
u It is neither a palace nor royal." 

There were, however, other public gardens. Those of 
the Tuileries were laid out very much as at present, the 
small piece of water included in which the viragoes were 
near ducking Theroigne de M£ricourt, but they were 
entered only by a drawbridge at the place Louis XV., by 
a narrow street, then called rue du Dauphin, now rue 
St. Roch, and by a narrow passage between the Feuillant 
and Capucin monasteries where the rue Castiglione now 
runs. The rue de Rivoli did not exist, the Manege or 
riding-school originally erected for Louis XIV. as a tablet 
on the spot commemorates, forming the northern boundary. 
The Arsenal gardens, now covered by streets and by the 
canal from the Seine to the Bastille, were also a spacious 
promenade, though they had lost the country prospect 
admired by Lister in 1698. The pre St. Gervais was in the 
same direction. The Temple gardens, replanted by Marigny 
in 1764, so that there could have been no trees of great size, 
were more accessible, and debtors there, as anywhere 
within the precincts, were safe from arrest. It all belonged 
to the Knights of Malta, heirs or supplanters of the 
Templars. 

The Champs Elysees, however, had already become one 
of the chief promenades. Designed and named in 1670, as 
an extension of the Cours-la-Reine, which had four lines of 
fine trees, it had only recently been completed. Its name 
was more appropriate then than now, for there were no 
houses in it, nor any indeed between the lower half of the 
faubourg St. Honore and the Seine. What was not public 
promenade consisted of meadows and market gardens, and 
in July 1789 a surgeon living near asked permission to send 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 23 

two cows to graze in the meadows separating the Champs 
Elys6es from Cours-la-Reine, to supply milk to his patients, 
but the permission was limited to a single cow. In 1791 
there was a protest against a scheme of building on these 
meadows and gardens, Paris, it was urged, being dependent 
on them for milk and vegetables. An ordinance of 1726 
against other than temporary erections or sheds was accord- 
ingly enforced. It was not until 1846 that Rond-Point was 
laid out in something like its present shape, a remodelling 
taking place in i860 ; nor was it till after the first Inter- 
national Exhibition of 1855, held in the now recently 
demolished Palace of Industry, erected on what had been 
an expanse of grass, that houses began to be constructed in 
the upper part of the Champs Elysdes. There was a large 
oblong space, not planted with trees, between the avenue 
des Tuileries, as the avenue des Champs Elysees was then 
called, and the Cours-la-Reine, which were connected by 
two transverse avenues, the avenue des Princes (now the 
avenue d'Antin), and the avenue des Veuves 1 (now the 
avenue Montaigne). This space, perhaps also the border 
of the avenue des Tuileries, and a wide space in the middle, 
was covered with grass, for Anacharsis Cloots speaks of 
two boys lying on the grass in the Champs Elysees, and in 
turn reading a book aloud. They answered so intelli- 
gently his remarks on the advantages of education that he 
asked them to join him in vigorously shouting "Vive la 
Republique ! " 

The Champs Elysees were not of course lit up at night. 
Paris itself, though lanterns had in 1766 been superseded 
by lamps, placed at street corners or suspended in the 
middle of the road, dispensed, indeed, with lights in 
summer, and had them for only a few hours in winter. 
The Champs Elysees were illuminated, however, on grand 
occasions, but only half-way up from the place Louis XV. 
(now de la Concorde) to the barriere, the future site of the 
Arc de Triomphe. So frequented were they on Sundays 

1 A few cottages stood in the triangle between the avenue des Veuves and the 
Cours-la-Reine. 



24 PARIS IN 1789-94 

that in August 1791 the municipality, to save promenaders 
from being covered with dust, resolved to water the 
avenues on Sundays and holidays till the 1st October. 
On the 1 8th September of that year the promulgation of 
the Constitution was celebrated there by the ascent of a 
balloon, which, after an hour's trip, alighted thirty miles 
off, and at ten at night the royal family drove through to 
see the illuminations. They were loudly cheered, albeit 
only three months had elapsed since the ignominious re- 
turn from Varennes. The illuminations were the work of 
the municipality, but touched by the manifestation of the 
love of his people, and wishing to give them a second 
festival, Louis XVI. on the following Sunday lit up both 
the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries gardens at his own 
expense. Cafes, shows, concerts, and amusements of all 
sorts were dotted over the Champs Elysees. 1 The northern 
avenue, bordered by the gardens of the faubourg St. Honore 
houses, was the favourite promenade. Near it stood the 
Colisee, the Jardin Mabille of that time, where balls and 
other entertainments were held, any theatrical performance, 
however, being forbidden as an infringement of the privi- 
leges of the theatres. A large space between the present 
Rond-Point and the avenue de Marigny was planted with 
trees. 

As for the place de la Concorde, where 120 persons 
were trampled to death in 1770 at the celebration of the 
Dauphin's marriage, an equestrian statue of Louis XV. — 
pulled down with other royal emblems in August 1792 — 
gave it its original name. Menageries and other shows 
were stationed in it, but in the spring of 1794 the sculp- 
tured horses from the old royal palace at Marly were 
placed in it. The bridge at one end of it was not com- 
pleted till 1790. 

The boulevards, however, were the chief resort on 
Sundays and holidays, except for those who went to 

1 Delecluze, in his " Life of Louis David," tells us that toy guillotines were 
sold there, and that in the Punch and Judy shows guillotining was substituted for 
hanging. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 25 

suburban villages. Not that the principal shops were 
there, for the rue St. Honore" was the great business 
street. The Flemish or German term "boulevard" had 
survived, though the bulwarks had been removed, save 
the portion between the chaussee d'Antin and the Made- 
leine, which remained till 1858, and the memory of which 
is still preserved by what is left of the rue Basse-du- 
Rempart. The greater part of that street was demolished 
in 1858, when the Opera was being erected, and another 
portion disappeared in 1893. Three of the gates, how- 
ever, those of St. Martin, St. Denis, and the Temple, 
had been left standing. Minor theatres, the waxworks 
of Curtius, Madame Tussaud's uncle — whence the mob 
on the 12th July 1789 carried off the busts of Necker 
and Orleans to parade them in triumph — and other places 
of amusement were to be found on or near the boule- 
vards. These included Astley's circus, with its two tiers 
of galleries and its 2000 lamps. Curtius, by the way — 
a German whose real name was Kreutz — had an ex- 
hibition in the Palais Royal as well as in the faubourg 
du Temple. There might be seen, in life size, the royal 
family, Frederick the Great, and Cagliostro. 

The Luxembourg gardens have been by turns reduced 
and extended, but the part immediately in front of 
Marie de Medicis' palace has never been tampered with. 
"Monsieur" (the future Louis XVIII.), to whom the 
palace was assigned in 1778, but who contented himself 
as a residence with the Petit Luxembourg, a smaller 
building on the west, built by Richelieu, sold part of 
the gardens, which was built upon and in honour of 
his wife named rue Madame. The gardens were but 
little frequented prior to the Revolution, but Diderot 
and Rousseau had promenaded in them. Close by was 
the cafe Procope, which was frequented by Marat, 
Danton, and Hebert, and which was not definitely closed 
till 1900. 

The Bois de Boulogne, though the scene of open-air 
balls, was still the King's hunting-ground, and in 1777 



26 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Soliman Aga, nephew by marriage of the Bey of Tunis, 
was taken there to shoot pheasants, while in the plain 
St. Denis he shot twenty-three hares. Only in Passion 
Week was it much resorted to. Fashionable Paris then 
flocked to the nunnery, of which the windmill alone 
remains, to hear the best female vocalists, engaged for 
the services. During the Revolution, Bagatelle, the 
hunting-box of the King's younger brother Artois, being 
confiscated, became a popular restaurant, but the Bois 
was not really a park till fifty years ago, the lakes 
being made in 1853. The villagers of Boulogne took 
advantage of the Revolution to begin cutting down the 
trees for fuel. On the 6th December 1789, 400 national 
guards arrested fifty-six delinquents, twenty of whom 
were fined. 1 As for the Champ de Mars, it was on the eve 
of becoming more accessible by the bridge (de la Con- 
corde) designed by the famous pontifex Perronet, who, 
though dismissed from office, lived to 1794, to the age 
of eighty-six, to see it completed. Some of the stones 
of the Bastille were used for it. But at the Federation 
of 1790 the procession had to cross the Seine to the 
Champs de Mars by a bridge of boats. So deserted was 
the spot at dusk that the Lameth-Castries duel took place 
there, for the sake of privacy, though Lameth had wished 
it to be in the Champs Elysees, in order to have a sympa- 
thising crowd. Bailly was guillotined there on the 10th 
November 1793, because there, as mayor of Paris, he 
had ordered the military on the 17th July 1791 to charge 
the mob. 

Such was the Paris of the Revolution. What remains 
of it ? The four buildings most closely associated with the 
Revolution have disappeared. The Bastille after its capture 
was quickly demolished, 2 and the column erected on its site 
commemorates not July 1789 but July 1830. The Hdtel de 
Ville, disfigured by the addition of two wings in 1837, was 

1 The Bois de Vincennes also underwent depredations. 

2 But some slight remains of its foundations were discovered in 1898 in making 
the Metropolitan railway. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 27 

burnt down by the Commune in 1871. Its demolition was 
proposed by Freron seven days after Robespierre's fall, on 
the ground that it had been the tyrant's " Louvre," but this 
absurd suggestion found no supporters. The edifice has 
been reconstructed in similar style. The Manege, in which 
the Assemblies sat from October 1789 to May 1793, was 
demolished to make way for the rue de Rivoli. In 1800 
it was used for a menagerie. A tablet indicates its site. 
The Tuileries were also burnt by the Commune in 1871, 
and a garden covers the site. Next to these four buildings 
in historical interest are the sites of the guillotine. It stood 
in the place du Carrousel till the 19th May 1793, when the 
Convention, installed in the Tuileries, disliked the vicinity 
of blood, albeit little foreseeing that executions would be- 
come a daily spectacle. The guillotine was accordingly 
removed to the place de la Revolution 1 (re-named Con- 
corde in 1795), between the Garde Meuble and the pedestal 
of the statue of Louis XV., a statue superseded in July 1793 
by one of Liberty, 2 famous for the invocation of Madame 
Roland. The death carts did not always take precisely the 
same route to it. Starting from the Palace of Justice, they 
sometimes passed along the quai de l'Horloge, crossed the 
Pont Neuf, and then went through the rues da la Monnaie 
and du Roule. At other times they took the Pont-au- 
Change, quai de la Megisserie, and rue de l'Arbre Sec. 
In either case they went through the rue St. Honor6, and 
the shopkeepers complained that their trade suffered from 
such processions. It should be explained that Louis XVI., 
starting not from the Palace of Justice but from the Temple, 
was taken round by the boulevards to the place de la 
Revolution, and even when summoned before the Conven- 
tion at the Tuileries nearly the same route had been taken, 

1 Chateaubriand was not a true prophet when, on searching for the spot where 
Charles I. was beheaded at Whitehall, he said : "Thus the foreigner a few years 
hence will ask for the place where Louis XVI. perished, and apathetic generations 
will scarcely be able to tell him." Louis's daughter, the Duchess of Angouleme, 
on re-entering Paris in 1814, said she would never pass the place de la Concorde, 
but she could scarcely have been able for sixteen years to avoid doing so. 

2 In plaster ; bronze was to have been, but never was substituted. 



28 PARIS IN 1789-94 

in preference to passing through narrow zigzag streets to 
the rue St. Honore. The only difference was that he 
turned off the boulevard to the rue des Capucines and the 
place Vendome, repeating the route taken by the whole 
royal family in September 1792 in going from the Feuillant 
monastery to the Temple. Even on the boulevards the 
road was narrow between the Porte St. Martin and the 
Porte St. Denis, for though the ramparts had been 
demolished, a short narrow street ran parallel with the 
boulevard. When the King, therefore, was on his way to 
the Convention, there was a block of vehicles at that point, 
and he expressed surprise that the two gates (as a glorifica- 
tion of Louis XIV.) had not been demolished. The mayor 
Chambon, who escorted him, replied that the Porte St. 
Denis as a masterpiece of art might be preserved. Both 
gates in the summer of 1793 narrowly escaped defacement 
at the hands of the Commune. But to return to the 
guillotine. In deference to the complaints of the rue St. 
Honore" tradesmen, the guillotine on the 8th June 1794 
was removed, not to the place de Greve, in front of the 
Hotel de Ville, the spot formerly used for executions, 1 but 
to the place St. Antoine, and after five days, the inhabitants 
again objecting, to the place du Trdne, alias place du 
Trone Renvers6, now place de la Nation. The carts pro- 
bably crossed the pont Notre Dame and the place de 
Greve, and then passed through the rues de la Coutellerie, 
de la Tissanderie (which has disappeared), and St. Antoine. 
Or they may have taken the Pont-au-Change, the houses 
on which had just been demolished, into the rue de la 
Coutellerie, or the rues la Verrerie and la Sicile. The rue 
and faubourg St. Antoine were in any case traversed. The 
place du Trdne was so far from the city and so little built 
upon that the Baron de Batz, the royalist who had tried to 
organise a conspiracy for the rescue of Marie Antoinette on 
her way to the scaffold, actually made nocturnal appoint- 
ments at the foot of the guillotine with Vallier, co-owner of 

1 As also for strikes, whence the word grive, which originally meant river-side, 
has come to signify a strike. 



\ 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 29 

an estate in the Puy-de-D6me, to settle business matters. 
Batz was liable to arrest and death at any moment, yet 
without fear of detection — people probably shunned by 
night the scene of daily butcheries — he there coolly spent 
hours with his partner in discussing business. 1 The partner 
was ultimately arrested, but Batz was never captured. 

The guillotine was brought back to the place de la 
Concorde for the execution of Robespierre and his asso- 
ciates, evidently in order that a great crowd might witness 
the sight. Six weeks before, he had passed through the 
square from the Tuileries gardens at his crowning triumph, 
the festival of the Supreme Being, and had marched past 
the statue of Liberty ; the guillotine, it being Decadi, the 
Jacobin sabbath, was then at rest, and was hidden by rich 
drapery. 

The Conciergerie and Palace of Justice have been 
partially destroyed, but there is shown the cell, though 
much altered, occupied for two months by Marie 
Antoinette. Still used as a cell until 1819, it is now 
the chapel, and there the Duke of Orleans attended 
mass in 1890, when, defying the law of banishment, he 
entered France to claim military service. There was an 
idea in 1869 of demolishing the cell, but Napoleon III. 
declared that it would be sacrilege to meddle with it, 
and he never held receptions, it may be remarked, on 
the anniversary of Louis XVI.'s death. The low door, 
however, under which the guides represent the Queen 
as having passed, is believed to be of later date. 

In the adjoining Palace of Justice, the salle de l'ligalite, 
in which both Marat and Charlotte Corday were tried, 
has disappeared, but the salle de la Liberty, whence 
Danton's thundering accents on his trial could be heard 
by the- crowd below on the quai de PHorloge, is now 
the first chamber of the civil tribunal. Marie Antoinette, 
the Girondins, and ultimately their accuser Fouquier- 
Tinville, were also tried there. The archway to the cour de 
May, where the victims mounted the tumbrils, also remains. 

1 Souvenirs de Berryer (pere), i. 258. 



30 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The Temple, in the tower of which the royal family 
were confined, was demolished, what remained of it, in 
181 1, but a weeping-willow in the garden, planted in 1814 
by the Duchess of Angouleme, shows where the tower 
stood. A market since 1802 covers the site of the monas- 
tery in the rue St. Honore where the Jacobin club met. 
The cafe Corazza, in the Palais Royal, is the building where 
Robespierre's overthrow was concerted. The Chapelle 
Expiatoire marks the spot where Louis and his Queen 
were interred, and where they lay until transported to 
St. Denis in 1815, but the field or garden at the north- 
west corner of the rue du Rocher, used after the closing 
of it as a cemetery from fear of infection, is now covered 
with houses, in digging the foundations of which the bones 
of some of the 1300 victims were discovered — possibly 
those of Princess Elizabeth, or Danton, or Robespierre. 

Notre Dame is of course unchanged. There we can fancy 
an Opera dancer enthroned, as symbol of Liberty. 1 At the 
Pantheon, too, we can picture to ourselves the apotheosis 
of Voltaire and Rousseau in 179 1, the pompous funeral of 
Mirabeau, and the equally pompous funeral of Marat. But 
let us not imagine that all of them still lie there. Mirabeau 
was ignominiously ousted on the discovery of his relations 
with the Court, and Marat on the collapse of Jacobinism. 

The Luxembourg should remind us that on its being 
made a political prison (it had temporarily been the Minis- 
try of Justice), iron bars were fixed on the windows, doors 
walled up, and partitions erected. As the palace, more- 
over, had many entrances, which it would have required 
numerous sentries to guard, a high hoarding was put up 
all round it. The prisoners seem for a time to have been 
able to promenade inside the hoarding, for we hear of 
friends exchanging hurried greetings through the crevices. 
To prevent this a rope was placed at ten paces outside 
the hoarding, and the distance was gradually increased 
until even promenaders in the gardens could not without 
a glass recognise captive friends standing at the upper 

1 See p. 114. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 31 

windows. 1 Desmoulins, confined in a room by himself, 
managed to see his mother-in-law in the gardens, trembling 
with emotion, but he had to write to his wife to buy him 
an eyeglass so that he, a little short-sighted, might perceive 
her as she hovered round the building during his short 
captivity. If we are to believe M. Louis Favre, 2 inscrip- 
tions by the prisoners on the walls and beams of the 
attics were visible until 1871, when the Luxembourg 
became for a time the Prefecture of the Seine, but this 
reads like a variation of the Carmelite legend presently 
to be mentioned, and when we hear of the dilapidated 
condition of the Palace, which obliged the Directory and 
Consulate to instal themselves in the Petit Luxembourg, it 
seems likely that inscriptions, if there were any, disappeared 
during the renovations undergone by the building at that 
period. The so-called Luxembourg prison, demolished in 
1848, was the old convent of the Daughters of Calvary, 
which served as a barrack from shortly after the Revolu- 
tion till 1830, and in 1835 was assigned to political 
prisoners. 

The Mint on the quai Conti should remind us that 
Condorcet (whose statue now stands close by) and his 
handsome and intelligent wife lived there till the King's 
return from Varennes in 1791, when republican views 
induced Condorcet to resign the post which had en- 
titled him to that residence. It is but a short distance 
from the Mint to 73 rue de Lille, where Condorcet 
resided in 1792, or to 15 rue Servandoni (then 21 rue des 
Fossoyeurs, an ominous address for the lodging-house, 
patronised chiefly by medical students), where for ten 
months he was sheltered by Madame Vernet, widow of 
a sculptor akin to the famous family of artists. Thither 
Madame Condorcet, in peasant's dress, would walk over 
from Auteuil, not avoiding the place de la Revolu- 
tion with its horrible guillotine, lest she should attract 

1 David, when imprisoned as a Robespierrist, sketched from his window the 
gardens, with the country visible in the background. 

2 Le Luxembourg, 1882. 



32 PARIS IN 1789-94 

suspicion, and awaiting outside the house a signal which 
told her she might enter. There, too, faithful servants 
sometimes conveyed messages, and there Condorcet wrote 
the Esquisse des Progres de V Esprit Humain, which ex- 
pressed that firm faith in progress which with him took 
the place of dogmatic religion. One of his fellow-lodgers, 
Marcoz, also a member of the Convention, brought him 
newspapers and tidings, being much too honest to de- 
nounce him, but too timorous, like many others, to 
protest against his proscription. The brave Madame 
Vernet, on the other hand, not only deliberately risked 
her life by harbouring an outlaw, but refused any 
payment for his room. 

The Carmelite monastery is now, as I have said, the 
Catholic Institute or University. On part of the garden 
being expropriated in 1867, the bones of some of the 
120 clerical victims of September 1792 were found in 
the well, and are now preserved in the crypt. But in 
visiting it let us beware of being misled by Lamartine's 
account of the attic styled " the Girondins' room." The 
Girondins were never confined there, nor were the in- 
scriptions on the walls traced in blood, but with ink 
which has turned green with age. They were the work 
of Destournelles, ex-minister of taxes, a witness against 
the Girondins, who was confined there from May to 
August 1794. His handwriting has been identified by 
M. Sorel, 1 and he evidently beguiled his captivity by 
ornamenting the walls with all the classical quotations, 
mostly stoical or declamatory, which he could remember. 
The " Martyrs' Chapel " at the Carmelites still, however, 
shows blood-stains on the walls and floors. St. Germain 
des Pres church is yet extant to remind us of the 
massacre enacted in its adjoining courts. St. Sulpice 
church reminds us of the banquet given there to Bonaparte 
on his return from Italy. The English Benedictine priory, 
where Dr. Johnson was made to feel quite at home 
— Cowley, the prior, accompanied by Father Wilkes, 

1 Sorel, Couvent des Cannes. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 33 

ironically styled by his fellows " No. 45," after his noto- 
rious namesake John Wilkes, renewed his acquaintance in 
London two years later — has passed into private hands. 
It is now 165 bis rue St. Jacques. The steps of St. Roch's 
church remind us of the suppression of the rising of 
Vendemiaire, in which Bonaparte played a certain though 
not the leading part, but the front of the church no longer, 
as on Carlyle's visit, shows traces of the fight. We still 
see the Garde Meuble, now the Ministry of Marine, which 
was robbed of its arms on the eve of the attack on the 
Bastille, and robbed also of its state jewels in September 
1792, and close by it the hotel (mansion) de l'lnfantado, 
from the corner of which there was access by the narrow 
passage de l'Orangerie to the Tuileries gardens. There 
the Emperor Alexander, as Talleyrand's guest, stayed in 
1 8 14 ; it is now the property of a Rothschild. A little 
farther east is the place Venddme. In this square took 
place on the 19th June 1792 a grand holocaust of 652 
volumes or bundles of genealogical documents from 
the Royal (now National) Library. For this vandalism 
Amailhou, the librarian, was responsible. On the 9th 
August 1793 a similar bonfire was made on the place de 
Greve. It is but fair to say that the period of vandalism 
— a word coined by Bishop Gregoire after the fall of 
Jacobinism — was of brief duration, measures being taken 
by committees of the Convention for the preservation 
of literary and artistic rarities. A less irreparable holo- 
caust was the burning of the Pope's bull against the 
civil constitution of the clergy, in the place Royale (now 
place des Vosges) on May-day 1791, followed two days 
afterwards by the burning of the Pope's effigy in the 
Palais Royal gardens. 

Pare Monceau, Egalit^'s hunting-box, though reduced 
in size, tells us of Marie Antoinette's last drive before 
her captivity, on the 20th June 1792. She little thought 
that her sister-in-law, Princess Elizabeth, would be 
buried close by the corner of it. That cemetery, as 
I have said, is covered by houses, but at the opposite 

c 



34 PARIS IN 1789-94 

extremity of Paris the field in which the Noailles family 
and other victims of the guillotine were interred was 
purchased five-and-twenty years afterwards by their families 
and entrusted to the care of the Picpus nuns. In their 
adjoining chapel are inscribed the names of the sufferers, 
and Lafayette l and others have been buried alongside their 
kindred. 

In the identification of private houses associated with 
revolutionary celebrities there are two difficulties : changes 
in the names of streets and changes in the system of num- 
bering. Tennyson asked the French in 1848 — 

" Why change the titles of your streets ? 
Ye fools, you'll want them back again." 

In December 1793 a report submitted to the Commune 
advocated a general — I was going to say rechristening, 
but Christianity was then abolished — a general re-naming 
of the streets. Most of them, it was suggested, might be 
named from the provincial towns in which direction they 
led, just as the rue St. Denis led to St. Denis. Others 
might be called after great men, following the example 
of Nancy, which had already a rue Sidney, for Algernon 
Sidney had then a sort of apotheosis in France. Others, 
again, might temporarily bear simply numbers, as had 
been done at Philadelphia. Another suggestion was that 
the streets should be named after moral qualities, frugality, 
temperance, &c. No such general transformation was 
effected, but the sections or the municipality, not content 
with expunging the term " Saint," had already begun to 
make partial changes. Thus in September 1792 the rue 
St. Anne became the rue Helvetius, the famous philo- 
sopher having lived there, and its old title was not restored 
till 18 14, when Madame de Stael, who then resided in it, 
heard a cabman, confusing old and new titles, call it 
" St. Helvetius." This " singular canonisation," as she 
terms it, reminds us of David Hume's street in Edinburgh 

1 Lafayette, by the way, lived in 1789 at what is now 119 rue de Lille, but the 
house has either been renovated or rebuilt. 




THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 35 

getting the name of St. David's. The rue des Cordeliers 
was re-named after Marat upon his death, the place Notre 
Dame became the place de la Raison, and the rue Richelieu 
the rue des Piques, the pike being the equipment of the 
National Guards. Pinkerton, the geographer, in 1802 found 
the concurrent use of old and new names very incon- 
venient. 

But although the streets rechristened — or generally 
##christened — in 1792 mostly recovered their old names 
after the Terror, subsequent changes have frequently 
been more lasting. There are, however, concordances 
to these alterations, whereas no concordance exists as 
to house-numbering, and even directories are here of 
little assistance, for they chiefly give shopkeepers. Nor 
do tablets help us, except in the solitary case of Mirabeau. 
A tablet on 42 rue de la Chauss^e d'Antin tells us that 
the great tribune died there, and he is known to have 
occupied the first floor with its three windows looking 
on the street. Lavoisier is known to have lived in what 
is now 17 boulevard de la Madeleine. The street bearing 
his name merely covers the site of the house occupied 
at a much later date by his widow. Andre Chdnier, the 
poet, lived and was arrested at what is now 97 rue de 
Clery, one of the smallest houses in Paris, with a frontage 
of only 8 feet, and an area of only 24 square metres. 
Madame Vigee-Lebrun, the artist, was a co-tenant, or 
rather the proprietor, for her husband had bought it in 
1778 for his business of picture-dealer. Santerre, whose 
brewery (now 11 rue.de Reuilly) Dr. Johnson visited 
with Thrale in 1775, lived at what is now 210 rue du 
faubourg St. Antoine. Hebert resided and had his printing- 
office in the Cour des Miracles, famous for the scene in 
Victor Hugo's Notre Dame. The fish-market was then held 
there, and the house must be still standing, but is not trace- 
able. Danton's house was demolished in 1867, when the 
boulevard St. Germain was extended. It was at the corner 
of the rue des Cordeliers and the Cour du Commerce. 
His statue now stands close by. The infamous shoemaker 



36 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Simon, the poor little Dauphin's persecutor, lived in a 
house opposite. Marat's house, also in the rue des Cor- 
deliers, existed till 1876. Desmoulins lived on the third 
story of what is now 22 rue de l'Odeon, though the tablet 
is mistakenly placed elsewhere. Beaumarchais' house stood 
in the boulevard named after him. The small hotel de la 
Providence, cul-de-sac St. Pierre, where Charlotte Corday 
lodged, has been traced by M. Lendtre to 14 rue Herold, 
which was recently demolished. 28 place Dauphine, the 
upper floor looking out on the quai de l'Horloge, is the 
birthplace of Madame Roland, and she must have passed 
it on her way to execution. No. 12 rue Guenegaud re- 
presents the hotel Britannique, where in 1791 she and 
her husband had a first-floor apartment. 1 The rue de la 
Harpe, their last Paris dwelling, has made way for the 
boulevard St. Michel. Her friend Helen Williams had an 
apartment in the rue du Bac, within easy distance, but we 
cannot tell which was the house. 

Thomas Paine, on his arrival in Paris in the autumn 
of 1792, lodged in White's hdtel Philadelphie, passage des 
Petits Peres. That passage, constructed in 1779, led from 
the rue Notre Dame des Victoires to the monastery of 
the Petits Peres, or Austin friars. Starting from south 
to north, it turned midway at a right angle from west to 
east. The houses facing the east backed on the rue 
Vivienne, while those facing the south had the monastery 
grounds at the back. That part of the passage running 
from south to north is now a portion of the rue de la 
Banque, for in 1846 the opening, continued northwards 
to the Bourse, received that name, but part of this block 
of houses was demolished in 1900. These changes, coupled 
with several re-numberings of the houses, render it difficult 
to identify White's, which ceased in 1810 to be an hotel. 
In the spring of 1793, probably at the time when, by 
Danton's friendly advice, he ceased to attend the Conven- 
tion, Paine went to lodge with Georget, a retired grocer, 
at 63 faubourg St. Denis. Sanson, the executioner, 

1 Revolution Francaise, April 1899. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 37 

was a fellow-lodger, and being able to speak English, 
once called on Paine to inquire whether he knew two 
young Englishmen who had been arrested. Sanson 
told Paine that he had read his " Rights of Man." x There 
must have then been two 63's, that on the east side in the 
section Nord, that on the west in the section Poissonniere, 
for a number then meant not the number of the house 
in a street, but the number in the section in which the 
street was situate. Now both the sections just named 
began their numbers at the southern extremity of the 
faubourg St. Denis. Georget's 63 was on the east side, 
in section Nord, as proved by the interference of that 
section with the fruit-garden, hereafter noticed. 2 A build- 
ing in the rear of the present No. 144, abutting on the 
Eastern Railway Company's office, 'seems to correspond 
with the situation and with Paine's description, or the 
house may have been demolished to make room for that 
office. 3 Whenever he went into Paris, Paine had thus 
to pass St. Lazare prison, which was full of political 
" suspects." A little lower down on his route there 
existed till 1896, at the entrance to the Cour des Petites 
Ecuries, the old porter's lodge of the royal stables, a low 
dingy building now superseded by a lofty modern house. 
The " Cour," a line of houses on each side evidently erected 
early in this century, marks the avenue or passage which 
led to the stables, an instance of builders' fondness for 
the line of least resistance. Paine, who must have daily 
passed that lodge, may also have been familiar with what 
is now the smallest house in Paris, 39 rue du Chateau 
d'Eau. Erected about 1780 in what was then called the 
rue Neuve St. Nicolas, it is only 10 feet wide, and has 
of course but a single room on each of its three floors. 
It stands on a narrow strip of ground projecting from 
the much larger space occupied by 66 faubourg St. Martin, 
by which street it has a second entrance. It is curious 

1 Conway, Works of Paine, iii. 317. 2 See p. 338 

3 See Dr. Moncure D. Conway's account of this and of Paine's other resi- 
dences in the Athenaum, April 1, 1899. 



38 PARIS IN 1789-94 

to find the irregular shapes of suburban garden-plots per- 
petuated in this way. 

On his release from captivity in November 1794 Paine 
enjoyed for eighteen months the hospitality of Monroe, 
the American ambassador to whom he owed his release. 
Monroe was for a short time staying at the h6tel des 
Etrangers, afterwards hotel de Castille, and now the 
printing-office of the Temps newspaper, in the rue de 
Richelieu ; but he afterwards purchased the pavilion de 
la Buxiere, at the north-east corner of the rue de Clichy. 
This had spacious grounds extending to the rue Blanche 
at the back, and to what is now the rue de Moncey on 
the south. 1 The Tivoli public gardens, on their removal 
from a site lower down the street and on the opposite 
side, appropriated in 1826 a portion of the grounds, and a 
debtors' prison was erected on another portion. Dwelling- 
houses and St. Louis' orphanage now stand on the site, 
but down to about i860 the pavilion or detached cottage 
— wealthy residents liked to have a pavilion looking out 
on the street, and serving both for observation and privacy 
— still remained at the corner of the rue Moncey. 2 Paine 
probably composed or completed in that pavilion the 
second part of his "Age of Reason." A remnant of the 
grounds, still planted with trees, may be observed at 12 
rue de Moncey. He next went to live with the printer 
Nicolas Bonneville at 4 rue du Theatre Fran^ais (now 
rue de l'Odeon), but which was then No. 4 can only be 
guessed at. Of Robespierre's house I have spoken in 
another chapter. 

It is curious in this connection to trace the successive 
systems of house-numbering. A deed of 1426 mentions 
two houses on the pont Notre Dame numbered XIII. 
and XII II., 3 but there is no proof that numbers existed 
anywhere else, nor even of their being retained when 
the bridge had to be rebuilt later on in that century. 
An ordinance of 1726, which for the first time prescribed 

1 See map in Jaillot, Recherches stir Paris, 1782. 

* Lefeuve, Anciennes Maisons de Paris, 1858-64. 

* Bulletin Soc. Hist, de Paris, 1878. 









THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 39 

numbering, with the evident intention of arresting the 
growth of Paris by forbidding the erection of new houses, 
was almost a dead letter, nor were ordinances of 1740 and 
1765 any better observed. The directory of that period 
shows a very partial numbering, probably confined to 
the houses of official personages. Shop-signs continued 
to be the general landmarks. An annual directory started 
in 1780 tried to facilitate matters for strangers by append- 
ing numbers to many houses, and these were accepted 
by the authorities. Aristocrats, however, according to 
Mercier, objected to their houses being numbered, as 
putting them on a level with ordinary citizens. In August 
1791, as a preliminary to a census, numbering was for the 
first time systematically enforced, but strange as it may 
seem to us, each of the forty-eight sections numbered its 
houses separately and consecutively. Where the numbers 
began and what line they followed we do not even -in 
general know. The principal streets being the boundaries 
of sections, there were instances of a long street being 
situated in six different sections, three on each side, and 
all six numbered independently. One street, indeed, was 
in no less than seventeen sections. A short street con- 
taining scarcely twenty houses might, by being taken last, 
have numbers as high as 2000. Hanrion 1 speaks of six 
sets of numbers in several streets and of going to three 
No. 42's before finding the house he wanted. The almanac 
of 1793, therefore, in giving the addresses of the members 
of the Convention, frequently gives no number, or helps 
the inquirer by stating that the house is near some public 
building or facing a certain side street. In 1797 the 
eighth arrondissement suggested that each entire street 
should have its separate numbering, but, apparently on 
the pattern of London or Philadelphia, it proposed that 
the numbers should begin at one end, be continued along 
that side of the street to the extremity, and then cross 
over and descend the other side. Thus in a street of 
200 houses No. 1 might be at the north-east end, 100 

1 Encore utt Tableau de Paris, an. 8. 



40 PARIS IN 1789-94 

at the south-east, 101 at the south-west, and 200 at the 
north-west. In June 1799 Sangrin, the lighting con- 
tractor, repeated the suggestion. In November 1800 
Auguste Leblond, a professor of mathematics, read a 
paper at the Museum of Arts in which he advocated 
that one side of a street should have even and the other 
odd numbers, the proximity of the Seine serving as a 
starting-point for streets at a right-angle with it, and the 
east or higher point of the river for streets running 
parallel with it. He also suggested that every lamp 
should bear the number of the house nearest to it, and 
that a separate number should be assigned to every ten 
metres, whether comprising only part of a house or 
more than one house. The numbers would thus have 
indicated distances, for 65 faubourg St. Denis would have 
been 650 metres from the south end of the street. This 
would have had its conveniences, but obviously also the 
drawback of a large house having two or more numbers 
and of several small houses having only one number 
in common. In spite of the obvious superiority of 
Leblond's scheme, the plan of the eighth arrondissement 
was ordered in 1801 to be adopted. That order, how- 
ever, remained almost a dead letter, for the directory of 
1802-5 shows the retention of the sectional numbering. 
Here and there, at long intervals, two numbers are given, 
as for instance " 10-120," the first being the new up-and- 
down-street number, and the second the sectional number, 
the name of the section being of course appended, for other- 
wise there would have been no clue to which part or side 
of a long street was meant. Several tablets of the names 
of streets affixed to street-corners, preserved at the musee 
Carnavalet, give the number of the section underneath, and 
at the north-west corner of the rue Poulletier, lie St. Louis, 
there is still cut out in the stone " No. 1," the sectional 
number of 1791. Not till the 4th February 1805 was 
Leblond's scheme carried out, and not till 1823 was it 
extended to provincial towns. In Brussels the sectional 
system was in use as late as 1827, and at Amsterdam it 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 41 

was still used in 1864. Once adopted in Paris, Leblond's 
principle was soon imitated, however, in foreign countries, 
and it is now of course almost universal. Prior to 1849, 
and again in that year, there was a rectification of 
the Paris numeration, the sub-numbers (bis, ter, &c.) 
being abolished, but the principle remained unaltered. 
These four numberings, however, render it difficult to 
identify a particular house. Possibly ratebooks at the 
hdtel de Ville would have furnished a concordance, but 
all the documents there were destroyed in 1871. Notaries' 
records, if accessible, might also furnish data, and 
occasionally on the sale of a house the former number 
is mentioned. We thus learn that 255 rue St. Honore 
was formerly 363, and that 1446, where the Terrorist 
Vadier lived, became 288. 

Does the reader desire to see not merely revolutionary 
sites but revolutionary relics ? At the National Archives 
he will find famous documents and signatures in profusion, 
not to speak of the chair in which the wounded Robespierre 
sat at the Tuileries, and the tables and chairs of the Re- 
volutionary Tribunal. Industrious antiquaries now use 
those chairs and tables while rummaging historical manu- 
scripts. We see the firm but rather formal round-hand 
of Louis XVI., a firmness displayed in nothing else by 
the unfortunate monarch. His letter to the Assembly, 
left by him at the Tuileries on his departure for Varennes, 
is in a small neat hand, the ink much faded. His brother, 
the future Louis XVI 1 1., had helped him to indite it. 
His letter to the Convention after his condemnation, 
asking permission to take leave of his family and prepare 
for death, shows no nervousness, nor does his will, which 
covers two closely written quarto pages, free from a single 
erasure. He had probably copied it from a draft. His 
two previous signatures show the same firmness, viz. a 
receipt for the documents delivered to him on the 
15th December 1792 in preparation for his trial, and the 
signature to his defence, the text of which is in de 
Seze's writing, the lines very close and not very easy 



42 PARIS IN 1789-94 

to read, here and there with corrections, as though the 
original draft had been thought sufficient by de Seze to 
read from without a fair copy being made. Louis, how- 
ever, whose signature resembled that of Louis XV., wrote 
a smaller and freer hand when not signing public docu- 
ments ; witness a list of invitations to a shooting-party 
issued by him in 1789. Marie Antoinette's writing, on 
the other hand, displays no character. It is a rather 
uneducated-looking, slovenly hand, no index whatever of 
her disposition. Her touching farewell letter to Princess 
Elizabeth, written at four o'clock on the morning of her 
execution on a sheet of very ordinary paper now yellow 
with age, so thin as to show the writing on the other 
page, is a very pathetic document, but is not striking 
as a piece of calligraphy. Fouquier-Tinville, instead of 
sending this letter to Princess Elizabeth, detained it, and 
after his execution it came into the possession of Courtois, 
a member of the Convention, who appropriated it, but in 
1816 it was seized by the police. The Queen's intercepted 
letter to her brother, the Emperor Leopold, dated the 
8th September 1791, is also of indifferent penmanship. 
At the Archives, too, are the signatures of the two poor 
little royal children to their interrogatory of September 
1 79 1 on the escape to Varennes. We likewise see Males- 
herbes' defence of Louis XVI., read before the Con- 
vention, and the record of the King's burial. A scrap 
of paper, very closely written, evidently in order to be 
secretly transmitted, in Monsieur's (Louis XVIII. 's) writing, 
bearing his initials and those of his brother the Comte 
d'Artois, was produced at the King's trial, having appar- 
ently been found in the iron cupboard of the Tuileries. 
Written in July 1791, just after the King's return from 
Varennes, and said to have been delivered by the Comte 
de Vergennes, it promised him every effort for his deliver- 
ance. We see, too, the Italian exercises of Princess Eliza- 
beth. There are also the signatures of the captives of the 
Temple to the interrogatory of the 3rd September 1792 
as to an attempt of their adherents to communicate with 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 43 

them. The Queen's signature in this case is neat and 
firm. The poor little Dauphin, in letters resembling print, 
signs " Louis Charles Capet," his sister in a good girl's hand 
signs "TheVese Capet," and their aunt subscribes herself 
"Elisabeth Capet" 1 How significant the acceptance of 
this surname, which the Jacobins had ridiculously imposed 
on the royal family ! Never would Louis, despite all his 
indecision, nor Marie Antoinette, with the pride of Maria 
Theresa's daughter, have stooped to this humiliation. As 
for the Dauphin, the poor boy was coerced into confess- 
ing that once, when Simon's back was turned, an attend- 
ant slipped a letter into the Queen's hand. There is his 
signature to the statement, and below it the rude, ill- 
spelt attestation of Simon, whom the guillotine eventually 
awaited. 

Then there is the famous Tennis-court oath, with the 
bold autograph of Mirabeau and the small, neat, pedantic 
writing of Robespierre. The signatures to the oath are 
rather closely written in consecutive pages of a book. 
There is also the Marquis de Br^ze's letter to Bailly, 
informing him that by royal orders the hall in which 
the Third Estate met was closed. There is the draft, 
in Mirabeau's writing, of a proposed address to the King 
on the 8th July 1789 to inform him of the critical situation. 
Then there is a list of the " victors of the Bastille," to the 
survivors of whom pensions were awarded in 1830. There 
is Cloots's letter to Barnave, censuring his duel with Cazales, 
and one of his addresses as " orator of the human race." 
Signatures of leading Revolutionists are plentiful. We 
see Danton's bold round-hand with a flourish at the end. 
There exist early specimens, though not at the Archives, 
in which with evident desire to creep into aristocratic 
rank he writes D'Anton, and there is an intermediate stage, 

1 When interrogated, however, previous to trial, though answering in the 
affirmative the question whether she was Elisabeth Marie Capet, she signed herself 
simply " Elisabeth Marie," and when asked whether she had " conspired with the 
late tyrant," she had the dignity to reply " I do not know whom you mean by that 
term." 



44 PARIS IN 1789-94 

" DAnton," before he adopts the plebeian Danton. 1 Robes- 
pierre, too, began by prefixing, as in the Tennis-court oath, 
a de to his name. A proposal made by him in the Assembly 
on the 20th April 1790 is likewise thus subscribed. His 
very last signature, a summons to Couthon to join him at 
the hdtel de Ville on the 9th Thermidor, is as free from 
tremor as signatures penned in calmer moments. So, 
too, are the first two letters of his signature, which he 
had just written when the supporters of the Convention 
forced their way into the hall and when he was either shot 
at or shot himself. This sheet of paper stained with his 
blood is in private hands. The Archives possess not only 
the documents found at Robespierre's lodgings, 2 but the 
contents of the younger Robespierre's pockets at the time 
of his suicide on the 10th Thermidor. 3 These consist of 
about half-a-dozen letters, the key of a desk or drawer, 
the emblem of membership of the Convention — a thick 
round piece of cardboard, with a hole at the top so as 
to be strung on a watchguard — and a small bundle of 
assignats, amounting to sixteen francs, which under the de- 
preciated currency perhaps represented about six shillings. 
Augustin Robespierre, together with Saint-Just, signed Maxi- 
milian's summons to Couthon to join him at the hotel de 
Ville on the 9th Thermidor. His handwriting resembles 
his brother's. These Robespierre relics are extremely 
interesting. 

There are specimens of Marat's apparently quick and 
legible but rather sprawling calligraphy, as in his denuncia- 
tion of the Girondins ; also of Guillotin's bold round-hand, 
of Condorcet's small neat signature, and of Lafayette's plain 
neat hand. There is Egalite's oath of fidelity to the Consti- 
tution, dated London, 13th February 1791, for Egalite was 
the last man against whom was enforced the royal pre- 
rogative of arbitrary banishment, and an ostensible mission 
to England thinly veiled the exile. He wrote a rather 

1 M. Aulard has given some curious facsimiles of these transitions. Roland 
and his wife in 1784 were unsuccessful applicants for lettres de noblesse, and 
Brissot, a native of Ouarville, styled himself M. de Warville. 

* See p. 485. 3 F. 7, 4433. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 45 

formal, pedagogic hand, with an elaborate flourish after 
his name. Even when, the day before his execution, he 
signed his interrogatory, his hand was as firm as that of 
his judges. Three times, viz. at the foot of each page, had 
he to subscribe " L. P. Joseph Egalite," and the habit of 
adding a flourish adhered to him even when thus signing 
what was virtually a death-warrant. There is a notebook 
of Barnave's reflections, found among his confiscated papers. 
There is Thomas Paine's opinion on the trial of Louis XVI. 
It is in French, having evidently been translated for him, 
but the signature is his, a plain, rather large round-hand. 
Dated the 20th November 1792, he advocated that Louis 
should be brought to trial, and he added a fling at u Mr. 
George, elector of Hanover." Two months later Paine 
had the courage to vote in the minority of 334 against 387 
against the sentence of death. There is the letter found 
in Roland's pocket in which he bade farewell to an earth 
on which his wife was about to be murdered. He did 
not wait, before stabbing himself on the highroad, to hear 
that she had actually been guillotined. The letter is in 
his usual steady hand. Stoicism, we see, was not wanting 
either among the Terrorists or their victims. There, too, 
is Madame Roland's writing, firm enough in a protest to 
the Convention against her second arrest, but rather 
trembling in the signature to her interrogatory, the day 
before her trial. What disillusions she had experienced 
since 1790, when she and her husband, watching the 
Revolution with enthusiasm from Lyons, subscribed six 
francs to a Rousseau monument ! By the way, there is 
the letter of Therese Levasseur, thanking the Convention, 
in 1793, for its homage to Rousseau's memory. She wrote 
an illiterate hand, and spelt his name with either an x or 
a z at the end. There is Charlotte Corday's letter to 
Barbaroux, as also her farewell letter to her father, which 
ends by bidding him remember the lines of Corneille, her 
collateral ancestor — 

" Le crime fait la honte, et non pas l'echafaud." 1 
1 Evidently a favourite quotation during the Terror. See p. 389. 



46 PARIS IN 1789-94 

" To-morrow at eight o'clock I am to be tried," she adds. 
There is no trace of nervousness in either of these letters. 
They bespeak the heroism of a woman who. had formed 
herself on classical models. But the infamous Carrier, of 
the Nantes noyades, could also write a firm bold hand in a 
protest against the composition of the tribunal which was 
to try him, and Fouquier-Tinville's defence has a long 
flourish at the end. Monsters of different dye, for Carrier 
simply wallowed in blood, while Fouquier shed blood by 
wholesale simply to save his own worthless life, both, it 
must be owned, met death without fear and without 
remorse. There are some of the keys of the Bastille, as 
also keys made by Louis XVI. An iron chest constructed 
in 1790 for the plates from which assignats were printed, 
now contains the meagre diary of Louis XVI., or rather 
his record of shooting game. 

The Mus6e Carnavalet, Madame de Sevigne's old house, 
likewise contains many revolutionary relics. There is Louis 
XVI.'s written order to his Swiss guards, on the 10th 
August 1792, to cease firing and to retire to their barracks. 
There is one of the gates of the Bastille, preserved till 
1898 at St. Pelagie prison. There is one of the models 
of the Bastille, made by Palloy out of the stones of the 
fortress, and another model in plaster taken from the ruins. 
The ironwork and fragments of the doors of the Concier- 
gerie are also preserved. There is a lock of Robespierre's 
hair, Marat's snuff-box, Saint-Just's watch, Desmoulins' ink- 
stand. There is the chair in which the paralytic Couthon 
wheeled himself to the Convention. Strangely enough, 
it was originally used by the Comtesse d'Artois, Louis 
XVI.'s sister-in-law, at Versailles. Couthon's grand-daughter 
recently presented it to the museum. Another recent gift 
is the pocket-book in which Condorcet wrote his will before 
poisoning himself. There is a timepiece with two dials, 
the second showing decimal time, in accordance with the 
scheme for a ten hours day, each hour divided into 100 
minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. It was appar- 
ently constructed in 1791, for it has portraits of the King, 



CAMILLE DESMOULINS 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 47 

Lafayette, and Bailly. If it ever worked it seems to have 
been long silent. There are also several decimal watches. 1 
There are pikes with which the national guards were 
armed, cartes de stirete issued by the sections and without 
which it was not safe to stir out at night, a banner which 
figured at the Federation of 1790, red caps worn by Jacobin 
heads long at rest, revolutionary packs of cards, with 
king and queen superseded by Hannibal and other em- 
blems, 2 tablets posted up in the schools inscribed "The 
French people acknowledge the existence of a Supreme 
Being," one of the flags on the "altar of the country" 
where volunteers enlisted for military service in 1793, 
and one of the busts of Marat placed in all the 
sectional halls. Most of these busts were shattered after 
Thermidor. More curious than all is a small volume 
containing the Constitution of 1791, bound in human 
skin. 

Other relics are in private hands. Desmoulins' farewell 
letter to his wife was offered for sale by a Paris auto- 
graph dealer in 1895. It had belonged to Matton, who 
befriended Adelaide Duplessis, the wife's sister, Adelaide 
living with him till her death in 1863 at Vervins. She 
is said to have refused an offer of marriage from 
Robespierre. The heart of the unfortunate Dauphin was 
from 1879 to 1895 in the possession of M. Prosper 
Deschamps, heir of Dr. Pelletan, son of the Dr. Pelletan 
who had attended the Dauphin in his last illness, who 
made the post-mortem examination, and who abstracted the 
heart. In 18 14 the poor boy's sister, the Duchess of 

1 A decree of the 4th Frimaire, year 2, directed that there should be ten hours, 
from midnight to midnight, and that each hour should have 100 minutes and each 
minute 100 seconds. This was not, however, to be compulsory in legal documents 
till the 1st Vendemiaire following, and when that day arrived nobody took any 
notice of the decree. Yet Sellier published a diagram of a dial showing the con- 
cordance between the old and the new system. Noon was of course five o'clock, 
and midnight ten. Campe, in 1802, saw a decimal clock outside the Tuileries. 
In 1 899 a bill was introduced into the French Chamber of Deputies for establish- 
ing decimal time, but of course it did not become law. 

2 Two lawyer's clerks, playing at cards, were arrested for speaking of 
"kings." 



48 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Angoul£me, visited the H6tel Dieu hospital on purpose to 
question Pelletan about it, for Chateaubriand had spoken 
of it in the Chamber of Peers ; but the Hundred Days 
intervened. In 1816 some official inquiries were made, and 
Pelletan flattered himself with the prospect of receiving 
some recognition for the restitution of the relic ; but both 
Louis XVIII. and Charles X., afraid probably of giving a 
stimulus to the discussion of the claims of the sham 
Dauphins, showed no inclination to accept it. Indeed 
Louis XVIII., naturally sceptical, is said to have doubted 
the authenticity of the remains of Louis XVI. and Marie 
Antoinette, exhumed in 181 5 and re-interred at St. Denis. 
The heart was temporarily in the charge of the Archbishop 
of Paris, and on his palace being sacked by the mob in 
1 83 1 it was found in a cupboard and sent to Pelletan's son. 
The Comte de Chambord made no answer to offers of it, 
but Don Carlos accepted it in 1895 and placed it in the 
Comte de Chambord's tomb. 

The Dauphin's body was interred in the churchyard of 
St. Margu6rite, which is now a garden. At the Restoration 
a search for it was instituted, but was abandoned. In 1846 
workmen, while digging for some repairs, came upon a 
lead coffin containing bones. These were believed to be 
the Dauphin's, and the discovery was reported by two 
doctors to the Academy of Medicine. The coffin was 
closed up again and re-buried. In June 1894 the prefect 
of the Seine allowed a fresh search to be made. The coffin 
of 1846 was taken up, and on the lid was found inscribed 
" L . . . XVII.," but the medical experts pronounced the 
body to be of the stature of an adult, and the teeth to be 
those of a person more than twelve years of age, the 
milk teeth having all disappeared, while the wisdom teeth 
were on the point of cutting. Thus the age was from 
eighteen to twenty, and the height 5 ft. 7 in. These 
appearances were quite inconsistent with the remains of 
a child ten years old, like the Dauphin. The only point 
open to doubt is whether the skeleton found in 1846 
was replaced or whether another was substituted for it. 



THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 49 

Relics of other kinds are in existence. I am unable, 
indeed, to ascertain what became of the King's wedding- 
ring and silver watch-seal, which on the day of his execu- 
tion his valet CleYy offered to the municipal commissaries 
at the Temple. The King had bidden him to deliver the 
ring to the Queen and to ask her forgiveness for his not 
having seen her that morning as had been arranged. Louis 
had been anxious to spare her the pain of a parting 
interview. The seal Cldry had been directed to give to the 
Dauphin. There were also four little packets folded in a 
bit of paper, containing the hair of the Queen, Princess 
Elizabeth, and the two royal children. These Clery should 
have given to the Queen. Unable or afraid to execute 
the commission, he offered all these mementoes to the 
municipal commissaries, but they directed him to retain 
them pending an order from the Commune. Nothing 
more is heard of them. If CleYy retained them he probably 
presented them in 1814 to Louis's daughter, the Duchess of 
Angouleme. In any case he preserved other relics, for on 
the 10th March 1896, at Rouen, there was a sale of the 
effects of his grand-daughter, Madame Le Besnier, nee C16ry 
de Gaillard. These included the shirt worn by the King 
the day before his death, an ink-stain on one of the wrist- 
bands evidently caused while he was writing his will ; the 
knife used by Marie Antoinette at the Conciergerie, the 
point intentionally blunted ; the hair of the King, Queen, 
their two children, Princess Elizabeth, and the princesse de 
Lamballe, and the Dauphin's coat and waistcoat. There 
were also the King's head-band, the napkin used by him on 
taking the communion on the morning of his execution, a 
key and lock ornament forged by him, Princess Elizabeth's 
head-dress, and the fragment of a beam of the Queen's cell 
at the Conciergerie. Altogether there were twenty-nine 
lots, which realised 19,694 francs. The King's shirt was 
knocked down for 2860 francs, and the Dauphin's jacket for 
2050 francs. 1 The French Government was not a bidder, 

1 France (Paris newspaper), March 12, 1896 ; Revue des Questions Historiques, 
July 1896. 

D 



50 PARIS IN 1789-94 

and most of the relics were purchased, as was believed, for 
the Duke of Parma. 

Madame Le Besnier had inherited only a portion of her 
grandfather's heirlooms. Of the remainder nothing seems 
to be known. 



CHAPTER II 

DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 

A Centenarian Serf — Cloots and his Cosmopolites — Americans — Paul 
Jones, Joel Barlow, Colonel Swan, &c. — Petitioners for Paine's 
Release — Reception of Monroe and other Ambassadors — Nantucket 
Whalers — More Quakers — Paoli — Mirabeau's Sister — Suppliants — 
Boys and Girls — A War Victim — Saltpetre — Tu versus Vous — 
Negroes — Singing Deputations — Masquerades — Goddess of Liberty 

The debates of the three Revolutionary Legislatures were 
from time to time enlivened by the reception of deputations 
of the most varied composition and with the most varied 
objects. These deputations, indeed, represent the entire 
gamut of human emotion. Laughter and tears, comedy 
and tragedy, buffoonery and pathos, rapture and anguish, 
philanthropy and hatred, prose and poetry, nay, even music, 
figure in the motley procession. Man is alternately the 
ape and the angel of Lord Beaconsfield's famous antithesis ; 
and such episodical characters are sometimes more interest- 
ing than the regular players. 

The reception of these deputations, complimentary, 
suppliant, or coercive, but always a waste of time, was one 
of the causes of the sterility of the Assemblies ; yet the evil 
was so gradual and insidious that we can scarcely blame 
them for not having checked it. As early, indeed, as the 
ist August 1789, when the National Assembly was still 
sitting at Versailles, there was a complaint that the pre- 
paration of the Constitution was thus delayed, and it was 
resolved that after the 8th no more deputations should be 
received ; but this good resolution was not acted upon. 

One of the earliest of these side-scenes was the appear- 
ance of the Jura serf, Jean Jacob, born at St. Sorbin on 
the 10th October 1669. His daughter, who, born when he 



52 PARIS IN 1789-94 

was eighty, had always refused to leave him, and a male 
relative brought the blind and deaf veteran to Paris, and 
he was ushered into the hall, " to pay his respects to the 
Assembly which had released his country from the bonds 
of servitude." Serfdom had lingered on some ecclesiastical 
domains in remote corners of France, and these Jura serfs, 
though otherwise free men, could not bequeath their little 
property away from their lord — not even property outside 
his territory — without his permission. Any one, moreover, 
living on such domains for twelve months became a serf. 
Voltaire, with his instinctive sympathy for the oppressed, 
denounced this vestige of feudalism, which led in 1779 
to a decree enfranchising the serfs on all royal lands, 
and recommending other proprietors to do likewise. The 
abbot of St. Claude, however, Jacob's lord, had refused to 
emancipate his serfs, and not till the 4th August 1789 was 
a clean sweep made of all these remnants of feudalism. 
Thereupon Jacob started for Paris, arrived on the 3rd 
October, was presented on the nth to the King, from 
whom he had for five years, in common with other 
centenarians, received a pension of 200 francs, and ap- 
peared before the Assembly on the 23rd. Sillery, the com- 
plaisant husband of Madame de Genlis, tells us in his 
journal what passed : — • 

A venerable deputy of Mont Jura, aged 120, presented himself. 
As soon as he appeared all the members of the Assembly rose, 1 
made him sit down, and told him to put on his hat. The President 
(Freteau) read out his baptismal certificate, translated from the 
Latin. The Assembly opened a patriotic subscription for him. 2 

The old man entered on crutches, supported by his 
attendants, and was conducted to a chair in front of the 
President's desk. A deputy, whose name escaped the 
Moniteur reporter, remarked that nature had reserved 
Jacob alias Bailly to witness the regeneration of France 

1 This had been previously resolved upon, at the instance of the abbe 
Gregoire. 

2 KK. 645. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 53 

and the liberty of his country. Up to the age of 105 
he had performed all the duties of a citizen. The King 
had seen and conversed with him, and had conferred a 
pension on him, but a collection among the deputies 
would increase the comfort of his remaining years, and 
would leave his family something by which to remember 
so eventful a day. A collection was thereupon made, 
but the President stated that Bourdon de la Crosniere, 
the author of a scheme of national education, was anxious 
to take the old man under his charge, so that his pupils 
might be trained to respect old age by waiting upon him, 
especially those whose fathers had perished at the capture 
of the Bastille. Viscount Mirabeau, "Barrel Mirabeau," 
as the corpulent man was called to distinguish him from 
his brother the famous orator, shrewdly exclaimed, "Do 
what you like for this old man, but leave him his freedom." 
Paris, he urged, evidently would not suit a centenarian 
accustomed to a rural life. 1 The President then told the 
old man that the Assembly were anxious not to tire him, 
and that he might withdraw. They hoped that he would 
long enjoy the spectacle of the complete freedom of his 
country. 

The invitation of Bourdon, who had opened a school 
in St. Martin's priory (now the Conservatoire des Arts et 
Metiers), does not seem to have been accepted. Escherny, 
who went to see the ex-serf, states that he professed to 
remember walking in Paris 102 years previously, and that 
he slept with his purse under his pillow for fear of robbery, 

1 Viscount Mirabeau little imagined that within ten months he would be an 
exile, and would be writing from Aix-la-Chapelle to the President of the 
Assembly : — 

" Renewing and endorsing all the protests made and to be made against all 
acts and decrees tending to destroy the monarchy, overturn constitutional law, 
destroy or impair the sacred titles of property upon which rest both the rights of 
the King, the first gentleman of France (a title so dear to Francis I. and his 
august house), and the rights of the three Orders dependent on the monarchy and 
those of all the citizens of the realm, I notify and beg you to notify that the first 
act of liberty which I enjoy outside the realm is to resign the title and function 
which the members of the noblesse of Limousin did me the honour of confiding to 
me in electing me deputy for their order to the States General." 



54 PARIS IN 1789-94 

but that his daughter and kinsman substituted copper 
coins for the gold ones given him, and that they made 
much money out of him. His portrait was taken by 
Garnery, and visitors doubtless made a point of purchasing 
a copy. He died in Paris on the 29th January 1790. 1 

Jacob represented emancipated serfs. John Baptist 
Cloots and his associates professed to represent enslaved 
mankind. On the evening of Saturday, the 19th June 
1790, Cloots headed what he grandiloquently termed the 
deputation du genre humain, and presented an address 
soliciting admission to the approaching Federation. In my 
"Glimpses of the French Revolution" I too hastily concluded 
that this document had not been preserved, and I conse- 
quently gave a list of the deputation derived from data 
partially erroneous. My only excuse is that no French 
writer had spoken of the manuscript as extant, not even 
Cloots's biographer Avenel, who might have been ex- 
pected to discover everything discoverable on this culmi- 
nating episode in his hero's life. The Museum of the 
National Archives, moreover, though exhibiting two docu- 
ments of the same date — Noailles' motion for the abolition 
of liveries, and Lepelletier's for the abolition of titles — 
contains nothing on this deputation, though it shows the 
letter written by Cloots in August 1790, reprobating the 
Barnave-Cazales duel, a much less characteristic document 
than Cloots's address. M. Tuetey, however, commissioned 
by the Paris municipality to prepare a Repertoire des Sources 
manuscrites de V Histoire de Paris pendant la Revolution, 
found the address among the mass of papers of the 
National Assembly at the Archives. Profiting by his re- 
search, I have had the satisfaction of inspecting this 
interesting document. 2 It is a sheet of foolscap, yellow 
with age but not soiled by wear, for it had probably lain 
untouched for a century when handled by M. Tuetey. The 
address, which is in Cloots's handwriting, occupies three 
pages and just turns over to page four. Then come the 

1 Escherny, Tableaux de la Rivolutioji ; Chronique de Paris, February 1, 1790. 

2 C. 29, No. 378. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 55 

signatures, which with one exception are not in the same 
ink. Cloots had evidently drawn up the address at home, 
had affixed his own signature, and had even written at the 
bottom of the fourth page " signatures des commissaires." 
His followers, as we know from contemporary reports, 
accompanied him after the presentation to a committee 
room, where they appended their signatures. The names 
are mostly in two columns, as though the deputation began 
by signing one below another on the left of the page, and 
when that side was full had continued on the right side ; 
but the two columns, so to speak, are not always quite 
parallel, and there are some cases in which three signatures 
appear on what may be called a line. 

Before giving the list, let us, in lieu of the dry official 
minute, read what Sillery entered into his journal of the 
Assembly on the 19th June 1790 : — 

Then came a deputation composed of Chaldeans, Arabs, 
Russians, Poles, English, Swiss, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Italians, 
Spaniards, Americans, Indians, Syrians, Brabanters, Liegers, 
Genevese, Sardinians, Grisoners, Sicilians ; and M. Cloots de Val- 
de-Grace, a Prussian, delivered an address signed by thirty-five 
commissaires of the Committee of Foreigners of all nations. It 
was decreed, in accordance with their request, that at the General 
Federation they should, to the number of a thousand, be in a tent 
erected for them. The enthusiasm successively infecting the 

members of the Assembly, MM. de Lameth, Lambel, H , and 

Lafayette proposed various motions by which it was resolved that 
the four chained figures at the foot of Louis XIV. 's statue in the 
place de Valois should be removed before the 14th July. 1 

Here, then, is the superbe discours, as it was styled by 
Thomas Lindet, afterwards a constitutional bishop : — 

The imposing collection of all flags of the French Empire about 
to be displayed on July 14 on the Champ de Mars, on the 
very spot where Julian trampled underfoot all prejudices, where 
Charlemagne was environed with all virtues — this civic solemnity 
will be the festival not merely of the French but of the human race. 
The trumpet which is sounding -the resurrection of a great people 

1 KK. 645, p. 696. 



56 PARIS IN 1789-94 

has resounded in the four corners of the world, and the songs of 
gladness of a chorus of twenty-five millions of free men have 
awakened the peoples entombed in a long slavery. The wisdom of 
your decrees, the union of the sons of France — this enchanting 
picture gives great uneasiness to despots, and just hopes to enslaved 
nations. A grand idea has occurred to us also, and we venture to 
say it will be the complement to the great national celebration. 
A number of foreigners of all countries on the earth ask leave to 
post themselves within the Champ de Mars, and the cap of Liberty 
which they will raise with transports will be a pledge of the early 
deliverance of their unhappy fellow-citizens. Roman conquerors 
liked to drag conquered peoples fastened to their chariots. You, 
gentlemen, by the most honourable of contracts, will see in your 
procession free men whose country is in chains, but whose country 
will one day be free through the influence of your indomitable 
courage and your philosophic laws. Our yearnings and homage 
will be the bonds which will fasten us to your triumphant chariots. 
Never was an embassy more sacred. Our credentials are not written 
on parchment, but our mission is engraven in ineffaceable characters 
on the hearts of all men, and, thanks to the framers of the Declara- 
tion of Rights, those characters will no longer be unintelligible to 
tyrants. You have legitimately recognised that sovereignty rests in 
the people. Now the people are everywhere under the yoke of 
dictators who, in spite of your principles, style themselves sovereigns. 
Dictatorship is usurped, but sovereignty is inviolable, and the 
ambassadors of tyrants could not honour your august festival like 
most of us, whose mission is tacitly acknowledged by our country- 
men, oppressed sovereigns. What a lesson for despots, what a 
consolation for unfortunate peoples, when we shall inform them that 
the first nation in Europe, by mustering its banners, has given us 
the signal of the happiness of France and of the two worlds ! We 
shall await in respectful silence the result of your deliberations on a 
petition dictated to us by enthusiasm for universal liberty. 

Cloots du Val-de-Grace. Osiander Jh. 

Abbema. B. comte de Boetzelaer. 

Gevers. T. T. de Mansvelt. 

F. A. Persoons. Salkind Hourwitz, Polonais. 

J. Bosscha. Price. 

W. Buys. Si Lamr' de Tripoule. 

De W acker van Zon. J. J. Raaff. 

Dom Chavrek, Arabe. 1 Chevalier. 

1 With Arab characters, apparently his name, appended. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 57 

DUMONT. BOLDONI. 

PlGALLE PERE. Z. VAN STAPHORST. 

A. Dumas. De Heyden. 

PlGALLE FILS. PAGE. 

J. Procter. Monakmeti de Tounisie. 

Casanova. Stamatv. 

N. C. Wittert. Goy. 1 

P. H. Marron. Townsend. 

Schluter. Martens. 

Cazadom Chammas, Chaldeen. Brown. 

The President, Baron de Menou, said : — 

Gentlemen, you have proved to-day to the entire universe that 
the progress made by one nation in philosophy and in the knowledge 
of the rights of man belongs equally to all other nations. There 
are epochs in the fasti of the world which influence the welfare or 
misery of all parts of the globe, and France ventures to-day to 
flatter herself that the example just set by her will be followed by 
peoples who, appreciating liberty, will teach monarchs that their 
real greatness consists in commanding free men and in executing 
the laws, and that they can be happy only by ensuring the happiness 
of those who have chosen them for their rulers. Yes, gentlemen, 
France will feel honoured in admitting you to the civic festival the 
preparations for which have been ordered by the Assembly, but as 
the price of this benefit she thinks herself entitled to require of you 
a signal testimony of gratitude. After the august ceremony, return 
to the localities where you were born ; tell your monarchs, your 
rulers, whatever name they bear, that if they are anxious to be 
remembered by the most distant posterity they have but to follow 
the example of Louis XVI., the restorer of French liberty. The 
National Assembly invites you to be present at the sitting. 

Baron de Menou accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, 
there married with Mahometan rites the daughter of the 
rich bath-proprietor at Rosetta, styled himself Abdallah 
Jacques Menou, took the command of the French army on 
Ruber's death, on returning to Europe with his wife and 
son became governor of Piedmont, and died in 1810. His 
son became secretary of the French legation in America, 
but was dismissed because in eighteen months he had not 

1 Blotted and nearly illegible. 



58 PARIS IN 1789-94 

sent a single despatch. He remained in America, living at 
Baltimore in straitened circumstances. 

Taking Sillery's categories, probably furnished by 
Cloots himself, we may approximately classify these men 
thus : Chaldean, Chammas ; Arab, Chavrek ; Prussian, 
Cloots ; Pole, Hourwitz ; English, Price, Procter, 
Townsend, Brown ; Swiss, Dumont ; Germans, Goy, 
Osiander, Schluter ; Dutch, Abbema, Gevers, Staphorst, 
Heyden, Mansvelt ; Swede, Martens ; Italian, Casanova ; 
Spaniards, Pigalle and his son ; Americans, Chevalier, 
Page, A. Dumas ; Syrian, Si Lamr' ; Brabanters and 
Liegers, Persoons, Buys, De Wacker, Bosscha, Boetzlaer, 
Wittert ; Genevese, Marron ; Grisoner, Raaff ; Sicilian, 
Boldoni. It is impossible, however, to be precisely 
accurate as to the nationalities represented. Thus Sillery 
overlooks the Greek Stamaty, and the official minute, 
in specifying the nationalities, also ignores the Greeks, 
though it inserts Avignonais. 

What is surprising is that we do not find on this de- 
putation men hitherto supposed to have formed part of it, 
and indeed to have been next to Cloots its most prominent 
members. There is no Olavide, the victim of the Spanish 
Inquisition ; no Pigott, the adversary of hats and of bread ; 
no De Kock, father of the prolific novelist. How is it that 
they have been erroneously numbered among Cloots's 
supporters ? The anti-revolutionists, as we learn from the 
Chronique de Paris (June 24), tried to ridicule the deputation 
by publishing a pretended list with satirical notes. That 
list, unfortunately, is not discoverable, but it elicited on 
the 30th a letter from Cloots, in which, after acknowledging 
the unexpected moderation of the Right, and even of an 
ex-prelate, who politely wished to have the passage on 
Julian expunged, he thus answers the taunt that the de- 
putation contained refugees : — 

There were, indeed, Dutch, Brabant, and Swiss democrats. Our 
calumniators would apparently have blushed to appear at the bar 
with Aristides and Themistocles, with Olavide and Trenck, those 
illustrious victims of the Inquisition and despotism. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 59 

Desmoulins, who in his Revolutions de Paris exclaims : 
" Such a collection of peoples had not been seen since the 
Tower of Babel ; there were Roumanians and Romans, 
Greeks and Persians, Russians and Turks, English and 
Ethiopians, Swedes and Indians, Poles, Americans, Arabs, 
Moors, and Scandinavians," seems to have inferred from 
Cloots's letter that Trenck was present, whereas he was 
then in Hungary. 1 Avenel goes further. He speaks of 
thirty-six members, including Pio, Olavide, Trenck, Boet- 
zlaer, Langrock, Van de Pol, Staphorst, Capellen, Nyss, 
De Kock, Balsa, De Raet, Van de Stenne, Goy, Pigott, 
Chavan, and Chammas. Now of these seventeen only three 
were really present — Staphorst, Chavan (more properly 
Chavrek), and Chammas. He evidently misunderstood 
Cloots's reference to Olavide and Trenck, who were no 
more present than Aristides and Themistocles, and he put 
down at random the foreigners who were then or after- 
wards, from choice or necessity, in Paris. It is strange, 
indeed, that Olavide and Pigott were not present, for they 
were in Paris about that time. They may, however, have 
witnessed the festival, for there is of course no list of the 
thousand foreigners for whom Cloots secured admission. 
Among these was Lord Wycombe, son of the first Mar- 
quis of Lansdowne, for Dr. Price, writing to the due 
de la Rochefoucault on the 2nd July says : "The Earl 
of Wycombe started last week for Paris. Several other 
friends of mine are also going to be present on the 14th." 2 
Another of the English spectators was Captain William 
Skinner, who had served in the navy, had been captured 
by the Americans in the War of Independence, and after 
the peace of 1782 had settled at Paris. There he was 
imprisoned under a lettre de cachet at the instance of a man 
whom he had reproved for indecorous behaviour. He 
associated with prominent revolutionists, but by 1792 was 

1 In September 1792 he wrote from Hamburg to the Convention to express 
regret that the care of his eight children, and the fear of a third confiscation, pre- 
vented him from repairing to France (C. 238). He went thither, however, 
unconscious that the guillotine awaited him, in the winter of 1792. 

2 Journal de la Societi de 1789. 



60 PARIS IN 1789-94 

horrified at their excesses, and returned to England. 
Refused readmission to active service in the navy, he 
largely supplemented his captain's half-pay by translations 
from the French and by editing or contributing to news- 
papers ; but his mind became affected, and in 1799, at] the 
age of thirty-nine, he committed suicide. He was a well- 
known frequenter of the Chapter coffee-house. 1 

The signatures show no arrangement by nationality. 
After Cloots, indeed, come several Dutch or Flemings, and 
here and there we may suppose that two friends kept close 
together and signed one after the other, but the four or 
five Englishmen, whom we might have expected to be 
clannish, are intermixed with other nationalities. It is also 
disappointing to find so many men devoid of eminence that 
we cannot trace who they were nor what became of them. 

Cloots might be passed over, his career being well known, 
but I have collected a few additional facts respecting him. 
The first revolutionist to discard his Christian name — in 
lieu of John Baptist he became Anacharsis — he challenged 
the abbe Fauchet in May 1791 to a public discussion on 
Christianity, a jury to decide ; but Fauchet declined the 
invitation. On the 13th December 1791 he harangued the 
Assembly on the European coalition. In April 1792 he pre- 
sented a patriotic gift. On the 12th August he introduced 
to the Assembly some Prussians who wished to join the 
French army. Admitted to French citizenship on the 
26th August 1792 — no other member of the deputation re- 
ceived that honour — he waited on the Assembly next day 
to take the oath, and to advocate a law against the tyrants. 2 
When in September 1792 Seine-et-Oise had to elect twelve 
deputies to the Convention, Cloots came sixth on the list 
by 279 votes out of 452. He was also returned for 
Saone-et- Loire, but he "opted" for Seine-et-Oise on the 
ground of priority. He not unnaturally thought that his 
parliamentary functions exempted him from sentry duty as 
a National Guard, but the Lepelletier section took a different 

1 Monthly Review, 1799 and 1 82 1. 2 C. 179. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 61 

view. On the 30th November 1793 the sectional committee 
ordered that his default should be recorded and notified 
to him. 1 Sentry duty signified acting as watch from seven 
in the morning till seven the next morning. It was hardly 
reasonable to expect members of the Convention, which 
sat daily, sometimes till late at night, to perform such 
duties. Earlier in that month, moreover, Cloots had been 
president of the Jacobin Club. Speaking in the Con- 
vention on the 24th April 1793, he whimsically proposed 
the disuse of the word French and the substitution of 
German {Germain), which would gratify a great neighbour- 
ing nation and bring Germany into incorporation with 
France. So wild a proposal probably made Robespierre 
imagine that his atheism and cosmopolitanism were a 
cloak for overturning the Republic, and on the 12th 
December 1793, at the instance of Robespierre, who 
virulently attacked him, he was expelled from the Jacobin 
Club. He thereupon printed and widely distributed a 
reply to Robespierre, who, thus provoked into further 
action, induced the Public Safety Committee to recommend 
the exclusion of foreigners from the Convention. Barere 
proposed this on the 27th December, and it was agreed 
to ; but next day Cloots boldly reappeared in the Con- 
vention, insisting that the measure was not retrospective. 
After a stormy scene the decree of expulsion was distinctly 
reaffirmed, and the same night the General Security 
Committee ordered his arrest. He was consigned to the 
Luxembourg. 2 He there found as room-mate his old friend 
Vincent, a leading member of the Cordeliers Club, who on 
the 2nd February was released. Vincent, immediately on 
his liberation, stirred up the club to agitate for the release 
of Cloots, but this agitation had the effect of the prisoner 
being transferred on the 7th March to St. Lazare, to remove 
him from the proximity of the club, and on the 20th he was 

1 F. 7, 2478. 

2 " There " (at the Luxembourg), says Helen Williams, "a friend of mine found 
him in daily controversy with Thomas Paine, who had just written the ' Age of 
Reason,' for' his credulity in still indulging so many religious and political pre- 
judices." 



// 



62 PARIS IN 1789-94 

brought to trial, in company with H6bert and eighteen 
others. 

He was indicted as " John Baptist, styling himself Ana- 
charsis Cloots," aged thirty-eight. Among the witnesses 
were Sambat, a house-painter cohabiting with an English- 
woman, and a juror on the revolutionary tribunal, but not, 
of course, acting as such in this case ; and Rose, aged 
forty, keeper of a restaurant in the rue Grange Bateliere, 
where Arthur Dillon was alleged to have given sumptuous 
dinners. Three days were occupied in examining forty- 
four witnesses, but when on the fourth day a forty-fifth 
had given evidence, the judge asked the jury whether they 
were sufficiently " enlightened." They replied in the affir- 
mative, whereupon, without hearing the witnesses for the 
defence, the judge summed up, and the jury returned their 
verdict of guilty. 1 Cloots met his fate with philosophic 
composure. On the morrow of his execution his effects 
were sealed, being left in the charge of his housekeeper, 
but on the 29th August 1794 the General Security Com- 
mittee ordered the unsealing, reserving to themselves 
everything of interest, while his books and newspapers 
were to be presented to the Lepelletier section. 2 When 
the sections were abolished these must have disappeared. 
A box of his papers was restored on the 28th December 
1795 to Alexandrine Ferdinandine de Dael, widow, who 
was perhaps his sister. He is said to have left an illegiti- 
mate daughter, who became the mother of a Parisian actress. 

Let us now see who the Englishmen were. " Price," 
written in a small neat hand, would at first sight appear 
to be Dr. Richard Price, the Unitarian minister whom 
Cloots, when visiting England, was advised by Burke to 
go and hear ; but there was a " Mr. Price," with whom 
Gouverneur Morris dined on the 27th May 1790, and this 
unknown Price must have been the man, for Dr. Price, in 
the letter already quoted, says : — 

I can scarcely imagine a spectacle (the Federation) which would 
give me so much pleasure as this would do, and I should certainly 

1 W. 339. ■ 2 AF. ii. * 256. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 63 

have yielded to the solicitations of my friends to be among the 
spectators if my ill-health did not render me incapable of bearing 
the trouble and fatigue of the journey. 

Price, however, on the 14th July 1790, ill-health not- 
withstanding, was prominent among the 652 members of 
the Revolution Society who celebrated the anniversary 
by a dinner in London. He died on the 19th April 1791. 
That Society, in acknowledging an address of condolence 
from Aix of the 16th November 1791, says : " He died 
rejoicing at the prospect which France had opened up to 
herself and the whole world, that righteousness, peace, and 
goodwill would be established on earth by the extension of 
freedom." 

Procter was perhaps the editor of a London Opposi- 
tion paper spoken of by Beaulieu. All we know is that 
he remained in or revisited Paris, for in October 1793 he 
was arrested with the other English as hostages for Toulon, 
and on the 3rd March 1794 the Piques section endorsed 
his petition to the General Security Committee for release. 1 
In October 1794 Procter advertised that he taught the 
English and American languages — there had been no ad- 
vertisements of lessons in foreign languages during the 
Terror — and he was still doing this in 1802. 

Page was possibly Francis Page, secretary to the 
Aldgate Society of Friends of the People, which on the 
12th November 1792, in a high-flown address to the Con- 
vention, greeted its members as " citizens of the universe, 
protectors of the great family of mankind." 2 He may, 
however, have been the St. Domingo delegate of that name 
who, on the 7th March 1794, was arrested and sent to the 
Luxembourg. 

Townsend may have been the Rev. Joseph Townsend, 
who, in 1785, published an account of a visit to Spain. It 
could not have been Thomas Townsend, a barrister, for 
he sided with Burke against the Revolution. Brown 
was probably the inspector of manufactures who, in 1789, 

1 F. 7, 2475. 2 C. 242. 



64 PARIS IN 1789-94 

extracted muriatic acid from sea-weed, and in 1790 made 
experiments with Milne's spinning-machine. But he may 
have been the editor of the Sheffield Patriot. 

The Low Countries furnished by far the largest con- 
tingent to the deputation, for political commotions there 
had made numerous exiles. The rising at Liege had been 
a liberal movement, whereas that in Belgium had com- 
menced as a reactionary opposition to Joseph II.'s reforms; 
but the Belgian insurgents had ultimately split into two 
parties, and this facilitated their defeat by the Emperor 
Leopold in 1790. Refugees of both sections took refuge in 
France, the liberals at Lille, the clericals at Douai. 

Abbema, the most prominent of these refugees, had 
become a banker in Paris. He was one of the directors of 
the new French East India Company, 1 and had belonged 
to the moderate royalist Society de 1789. On the 19th 
January 1792, with Huber, Boetzlaer, Van Hoey, De Witt, 
and De Kock, he waited on the Assembly to solicit 
pecuniary assistance for the Dutch refugees. On the 12th 
November 1793 he was arrested, and his house searched. 
On the 23rd he informed the Lepelletier section that he 
owed £52,000 to Joseph Ewbank, an Englishman at Valen- 
ciennes. The debt was incurred prior to the siege of that 
town, and larger sums were due to him by London mer- 
chants, but, the mails being suspended, he could not 
ascertain how he really stood. He was evidently desirous 
of forestalling the discovery that he had had dealings with 
Englishmen, for eight days later his papers were examined 
in his presence. These measures were taken by the 
General Security Committee, but on the 26th December 
that body received information that the Public Safety 
Committee had confidence in Abbema, and desired to 
employ him. Thereupon, considering that he had been 
arrested simply because he was a banker, and hoping that 
his public services would justify his liberation, the General 
Security Committee ordered his release. He was again, 
however, arrested, this time by order of the Subsistence 

1 Almanack Royal, 1791. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 65 

(Food) Committee, and was at the Luxembourg from the 
5th to the 20th March 1794. In 1806 the chevalier Abbema, 
doubtless the same man, was appointed a Councillor of 
State in Holland, and under Napoleon he was afterwards 
sub-prefect of Amsterdam. 

Gevers was possibly the Hugo Gevers, a merchant at 
Dordrecht, to whom the Batavian patriots in Paris addressed 
despatches in 1794-95. 1 But he was more probably the 
P. Gevers who at the Hague in 1795 petitioned the Pro- 
visional Assembly for the impeachment of the Stattholder, 
William V., who had taken refuge in England. 2 He after- 
wards, in the Batavian Assembly, spoke on a proposal to 
solicit prayers for Consul Bonaparte. 3 Buys, on New 
Year's Day 1797, delivered an address to the Patriotic 
Society of the Hague. 4 Under Napoleon he was sub- 
prefect of Leyden. Bosscha may have been, under 
different spellings of the name, the Bosschart who was a 
member of the Provisional Government of Bruges ; the 
u Bosc " who, on the 12th April 1792, presented the Assembly 
with some Dutch verses on the French constitution ; and 
the Herman Bosscha, whose Latin poems were published 
at Deventer, in 1820, by his son Peter. Boetzlaer, as we 
have seen, was acquainted with Abbema, and was also a 
member of the Societe de 1789. He may probably be 
identified with the Christophe Bazelaire, aged fifty-seven, 
who was imprisoned at the Carmelites from the 13th 
January to the 20th August 1794. Staphorst had been a 
banker at Amsterdam, and likewise a member of the 
Societe de 1789. He accompanied Abbema to Berne in 
August 1794, on a mission from the Public Safety Com- 
mittee. Cambon is reported to have said to them, when 
they remonstrated against French confiscation in Holland, 
" As you have no ecclesiastical property with which to pay 
the Revolution, we must revolutionise money-bags." 

1 A. F. ii. 31. 2 Mo7iiteur, xxvi. 305. 

3 Gevers, page to Napoleon, and in 1814 an officer who distinguished himself 
in the defence of Schlettstadt, was probably his son. 

4 Monitetir, xxviii. 516. 

E 



66 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Frederic Heyden, a member of the Feuillants and 1789 
clubs, was born in Prussia, but was of Dutch extraction. 
He fought for American independence, and against the 
Orange dynasty in Holland. On the creation of a German 
legion in France in September 1792 he was appointed a 
lieutenant-colonel, and on the flight of Dumouriez he was 
nominated commandant of Philippeville. In the spring of 
1793 the legion was ordered to the Pyrenees. On arriving 
at Tours in May, the mob was incited against the twenty- 
four officers by two privates whom they had had to punish 
for insubordination. The officers were thrown into dun- 
geons — Marceau, then a captain, was among them — and 
not till August, on an appeal to the Convention, were 
they released. On the 31st March 1794 Heyden was 
arrested in Paris by the Mail section, but was released after 
a fortnight by the General Security Committee. Jean 
Jacques Raaff, born at Rotterdam in 1760, joined the 
French army. 

Augustus Osiander, probably a scion of a well-known 
family of German pastors, was imprisoned at the Carmelites 
from the 16th December 1793 to the 24th August 1794. 
In the directory of 1797 he figures as a commission- 
agent. Gaspar Goy was acquainted with Madame Roland, 
who interested herself in his illegitimate son by Therese 
Blanc, born in 1787. For twelve years a teacher of 
German at Versailles, he removed in 1791 to Paris. He 
published some German verses on the Bastille anniver- 
sary. In January 1792 he, or a homonym, was in London ; 
for Biron, who had been sent thither to buy horses for 
the army, suggested that Goy should be employed in sell- 
ing French brandy and wine in England, the profit to 
go towards the purchase of horses. 1 Goy was ultimately 
imprisoned at St. Pelagie and the Hotel Dieu. 

Dumont, if we have correctly classed him as a Swiss, 
was one of Mirabeau's speechmakers, was tutor to Lord 
Wycombe, and the disciple and friend of Jeremy Bentham. 
He was probably the Dumont who, from the galleries of 

1 Pallain, Mission de Talleyrand a Londres. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 67 

the Assembly, on the 4th February 1790, took the consti- 
tutional oath. Eventually disillusioned with the Revolu- 
tion, he probably did not care to reveal his presence on 
the deputation. 

Marron, though chaplain to the Dutch embassy until 
dismissed for his sympathy with the anti-Orange party, 
was a Genevese, the descendant of French Huguenot 
refugees. He attended Paul Jones's funeral on the 13th 
October 1791, 1 and he held a special service at St. Thomas 
du Louvre — the church assigned to the Protestants on 
their recovering toleration — to celebrate the completion 
of the Constitution. The Paris municipality attended it. 
He was, indeed, the first French Protestant minister at 
Paris, and in the autumn of 1793, when the churches were 
being stripped by the Jacobins, he offered the municipality 
his communion-plate. Imprisoned in the Terror, he was 
afterwards president of the Paris Protestant consistory, in 
which capacity he had several times to harangue and 
compliment Napoleon. In 1812 he spoke at the funeral 
of the Jewish rabbi Santzheim. 

Zalkind Hourwitz, a Polish Jew, on first coming to 
Paris had dealt in old clothes, to maintain himself while 
devoting his nights to study. 2 In 1785 he was one of the 
three successful competitors — the abbe Gregoire and 
Thiery of Nancy were the others — for a prize offered by 
the Academy of Metz on the best means of rendering the 
Jews happier and more useful. His essay was a plea for 
Jewish emancipation. On the 13th May 1789 he was 
appointed an "interpreter " at the King's (now the National) 
Library, a post which seems to have involved teaching at 
the College de France and the care of books and manu- 
scripts. In May 1791 he figured on a Jewish deputation 
to the Paris municipality in an application for civic rights. 
On the 28th April 1792 he subscribed fifty francs towards 
the war. Translator to Beaubourg section, he was sworn 
on the 22nd December 1793 not to divulge the contents of 
any Hebrew, Syriac, or other document entrusted to him. 

1 See pp. 80-81. 2 Kahn, Les Juifs a Paris dans la Revolution. 



68 PARIS IN 1789-94 

In August 1797, when people were discussing what to do 
with the bronze horses brought from Venice, he suggested 
that they should be placed at the corners of the pont de la 
Concorde, and should be lit up by lamps at night. He 
became a teacher of languages, published in 181 1 a system 
of shorthand, and died in the following year. 

Dom Chavrek was also at the King's Library. The 
Revolution was not destined to benefit him. On the 28th 
April 1793 David Chavrek and Joseph Behenam (a Chaldean 
priest naturalised in France in 1776) complained to the 
Convention of the stoppage of their salaries. On the 3rd 
August following the Convention voted 1200 francs to 
Chavrek as compensation for the abolition of his office, 
and a pension of 1000 francs to Behenam. On the 1st 
November "Chavis" or "Chaviche," as his name appears 
in the minutes, presented the Convention with an Arab 
translation of its address to the French people, and he 
solicited further compensation, apparently without result. 
On the 5th April 1794, a prisoner at the Luxembourg, he 
petitioned the Public Safety Committee for release. He 
stated that he came to France in 1786 to translate oriental 
manuscripts at the Library, that he was unjustly dismissed 
by Roland in 1792, that he had married a Frenchwoman, 
by whom he had an infant six months old, and that the 
denunciation of a Jew, Pereyra, since guillotined, had led 
to his arrest. 1 On the 23rd October 1794, having again 
translated into Arabic an address by the Convention to the 
French people, he received " honourable mention," and the 
Education Committee was directed to consider his claim 
for arrears of pension. Chavrek was doubtless the man 
who, responding to President Menou, uttered some 
sentences in scarcely intelligible French on the new 
Constitution having ensured the happiness of the universe, 
whereupon the President rejoined : — 

Arabia formerly gave Europe lessons in philosophy. It was she 
who, having preserved the deposit of the exact sciences, spread 
through the rest of the world the sublime knowledge of every 

J F. 7, 3822. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 69 

department of mathematics. To-day France, wishing to pay the 
debt of Europe, gives you lessons in liberty, and exhorts you to 
propagate them in your own country. 

As for the three other orientals, Si Lamr of Tripoli, 
Chammas the Chaldean, and Monakmeti of Tunis, nothing 
is known of them. 

Let us turn to the Italians. Casanova may have been 
Arrighi de Casanova, a Corsican, who in 1774 married a 
cousin of Napoleon, or his son, the future General Arrighi, 
due de Padoue. It seems unlikely, however, that a Corsi- 
can thus posed as a foreigner. It was more probably 
Francis, brother of the man famous for his adventures and 
his licentious memoirs, who seems to have been in 1792 
in Bohemia. Francis, born in 1727, was a painter and 
engraver who long resided in Paris, and was apparently 
there in December 1790. 1 There were, however, two other 
brothers, artists, who were living at Turin in 1806. The 
abbe" Boldoni was a teacher of Italian in Paris in 1787, if 
not earlier. He probably helped to capture the Bastille, 
for he was one of the militiamen of St. Antoine enlisted on 
the previous day. On the 10th November 1792 he published 
an article urging that France had nothing to fear from a 
war with England, for such a war would merely precipitate 
an English revolution. Up to 1820 he was still teaching 
Italian in one of the Paris colleges. 

Constantine Stamati was a Greek of Constantinople. 
He came to Paris in 1787 to study medicine, but remained 
as agent or correspondent. He addressed news-letters or 
despatches to Kodrikas, secretary to Prince Michael Soutza, 
hospodar of Moldavia. 2 Among his friends in Paris were 
Daniel Philippides, who came to see the Revolution, and 
Dimos Stephanopolis, whom Bonaparte some years later 
despatched to Greece to sound the prospects of a rising 
against Turkey. Stamati deplored the excesses of the 
Revolution. In 1796 he was appointed French consul to 
the Danubian principalities, but Turkey refused to acknow- 
ledge him in that capacity. He afterwards headed a Greek 

1 Moniteur, ii. 292. 2 These have been published by Jules Lair. 



70 PARIS IN 1789-94 

insurrectionary committee at Ancona. In 1798 he was 
French agent at Altona. In that year he translated for the 
Directory, into Greek, a manifesto urging distrust of Russia, 
and patience till the arrival of French aid. This was pro- 
fusely circulated in Greece. He returned to Paris in 1799. 
From 1801 to 1817 he was French consul at Civita Vecchia. 
He probably died in the latter year. 

Pigalle, whose nationality is uncertain, was probably 
the friend of Danton and member of the Luxembourg 
section revolutionary committee who was imprisoned, but 
released ten days after Robespierre's fall. He was appar- 
ently a sculptor and ironfounder. 

We come lastly to the Americans, which term was 
oddly applied not only by Cloots but by general usage to 
Frenchmen who had been born or had lived in the New 
World. French citizens, however, should scarcely have 
figured on a deputation of foreigners, and Cloots was 
twitted with this anomaly. Chevalier was probably an 
American after this fashion ; and there was a Chevalier 
who complained to the Convention of banishment from 
the isle of St. Pierre Miquelon. Thanks to his giving the 
initial of his Christian name, Dumas may be identified as 
the father of the great novelist. This Alexander the first, 
son of the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Paillet- 
terie by a negress, Marie Dumas, was born in St. Domingo 
in 1762. His father brought the mulatto child back with 
him to France, so that he never again saw his mother. He 
was brought up at Bordeaux, but in 1786, after a quarrel 
on account of the father having at seventy-four years of age 
married his housemaid, the son enlisted in the army under 
his mother's name of Dumas. In 1790 he was in garrison 
near Paris. Dumas served in Flanders, and writing to the 
Convention from Cambrai on the 4th December 1792, he 
enclosed six francs as his share of the proceeds of the sale 
of the carbines of twelve Tyrolese sharpshooters captured 
by him at the camp of Moulde. He signed his letter 
"Dumas, Americain." 1 In 1797 he earned the title of the 

1 C. 242. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 71 

" Horatius Codes of the Tyrol," for he held the bridge of 
Brixen, killing eight and wounding two Austrians, and being 
himself covered with wounds, till comrades came to his 
relief. He possessed herculean strength, a quality which 
his son partially inherited. That son professed to remember 
being taken by his father to the palace Borghese (now the 
British embassy) to wait on Napoleon's sister, who pre- 
sented the boy with an ornamental box of sweetmeats. 
He also professed to remember seeing his father tear out 
a thick iron bar embedded in a block of stone. But as 
Alexander the first died when his son was only three years 
and a half old, these recollections must be subject to dis- 
count. General Dumas accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, 
and on his way back, driven by a storm into a Neapolitan 
port, he was detained a prisoner for two years. He believed 
that an attempt was there made to poison him. He disliked 
Napoleon, who reciprocated the feeling. He died in 1807. 
The United States, it will have been remarked, were not 
represented in Cloots's deputation. On the 10th July 1790 
they presented an address of their own. 1 Probably drawn 
up by Joel Barlow, it is not in the handwriting of any of 
the signers, but apparently in that of a French translator. 
It is in these terms : — 

Struck with admiration at the development and extension of 
their own principles in this happy country, the citizens of the 
United States of America now in Paris ardently solicit the favour 
of approaching the sacred altar of liberty, and of testifying to the 
National Assembly the warm gratitude and the profound respect 
merited by the fathers of a great people and the benefactors of the 
human race. The western star which is shedding its light from 
distant shores unites its rays with those of the glorious sun which 
is pouring floods of light on the French Empire, to enlighten, 
eventually, the universe. The force of truth is irresistible, and 
the celerity of its progress is beyond all calculation. We believed 
and we sincerely desired that the blessings of liberty would be one 
day appreciated; that nations would emerge from their lethargy, 
and would claim the rights of man with a voice that could not be 

1 The Legation took no part in it. Gouverneur Morris seems to have gone 
to England to be out of the way of the celebration. 



72 PARIS IN 1789-94 

stifled. We believed that the luxury and passion of ruling would 
lose their illusory charms ; that those chiefs, those kings, those gods 
of the earth, would renounce the idolatrous distinctions lavished 
upon them, in order to mingle with their fellow-citizens and rejoice 
at their happiness. We believed that religion would divest itself of 
its borrowed terrors, and would reject the murderous arms of in- 
tolerance and fanaticism, in order to take up the sceptre of peace. 
These events are now hastening on in a surprising manner, and we 
experience an inexpressible and till now unknown delight at finding 
ourselves in the presence of this venerable assembly of the heroes 
of humanity, who with so much success have fought in the field 
of truth and virtue. May the pleasing emotions of a satisfied 
conscience and the benedictions of a happy and grateful people 
be the reward of your generous efforts ! May the patriot king 
who has so nobly sacrificed with you upon the altar of the country 
amply share the fruits ! The monarch who, in beginning his career, 
diffused his blessings on distant regions was well worthy of exchang- 
ing the seductive lustre of arbitrary power for the love and gratitude 
of his fellow-citizens. In regenerated France he may well be called 
the first King of the French, but in the language of the universe 
he will be the first King of Men. We have but one desire : it is 
that you would kindly grant us the honour of attending the august 
ceremony which is to ensure for ever the happiness of France. 
When the French fought and shed their blood with us under the 
standard of liberty, they taught us to love it. Now that the estab- 
lishment of the same principles brings us nearer together and 
tightens our bonds, we can find in our hearts only the pleasing 
sentiments of brothers and fellow-citizens. It is at the foot of the 
same altar where the representatives and citizen soldiers of a vast 
and powerful empire will pronounce the oath of fidelity to the 
nation, to the law, and to the King that we shall swear everlasting 
friendship to the French — yes, to all Frenchmen faithful to the 
principles which you have consecrated; for like you we cherish 
liberty, like you we love peace. 

Paul Jones. Benjamin Jarvis. 

Samuel Blackden. G. Howell. 

James Swan. W. H. Vernon. 

Joel Barlow. Thomas Appleton. 

Francis L. Taney. William Harrison. 

Alexander Contee. James Anderson. 1 

1 The names were given at the time in the Moniteur, but not quite in the 
correct order and with a mistake in one Christian name. I therefore take them 
from the original (C. 29, No. 377). 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 73 

The President, the marquis de Bonnay, 1 in reply 
said : — 

It was by helping you to conquer liberty that the French learned 
to understand and love it. The hands which went to burst your 
fetters were not made to wear them themselves ; but, more fortunate 
than you, it is our King himself, it is a patriot and citizen king, who 
has called us to the happiness which we are enjoying — that happi- 
ness which has cost us merely sacrifices, but which you paid for 
with torrents of blood. Two different paths have led us to the 
same goal. Courage broke your chains ; reason has made ours fall 
off. Through you liberty has founded its empire in the west, but 
in the east also it has innumerable subjects, and its throne now 
rests on the two worlds. The National Assembly receives with 
pleasing satisfaction the fraternal homage rendered by the citizens 
of the United States of America now present. May they ever call 
us brothers ! May Americans and French be only one people ! 
United in heart, united in principles, the National Assembly will 
see them with pleasure united in that national festival which 
is about to furnish a spectacle hitherto unknown in the universe. 
The National Assembly offers you the honours of the sitting. 

John Paul Jones signs in a bold round hand. The son 
of a gardener named Paul at Kirkbean, Kirkcudbrightshire, 
details of his early life cannot be positively ascertained. 
Was he apprenticed at Whitehaven, Cumberland, and 
did he run away to sea ? Anyhow, according to the 
tradition at Fredericksburg, Virginia, he there joined, 
not, as is commonly stated, a brother, but an uncle, 
John Paul. The latter, like fellow Scots, Camerons and 
Gordons, in that town, had an agency for shipping 
tobacco and wheat to Glasgow. A tombstone in the 
Episcopal churchyard, inscribed " I. P.," is believed to 
mark his resting-place. Paul Jones is said to have next 
been mate on two slave-ships, and at Tobago he had 
an affair of which two different versions are given. The 
first is that he was charged with cruelty to one of the 
crew, a mulatto, and that though the charge was dismissed 
the man shortly afterwards died, whereupon the accusation 

1 He understood though he could not speak English, and had translated 
" Tristram Shandy." 



74 PARIS IN 1789-94 

was revived. The Fredericksburg tradition, which seems 
more probable, is that he killed a man in a street 
brawl, and had to take to flight. He went to North 
Carolina, where he was befriended by Willie Jones, a 
member of Congress who, like his brother Allen Jones, 
had been educated in England, at Eton. Willie Jones, 
according to the same tradition, sent the youth to school, 
for if he went to sea at twelve years of age he could have 
had little education, and about 1773 — he was then twenty- 
seven, and what he had been doing in the few previous 
years is not clear — John Paul, out of gratitude to his 
benefactor, adopted the name of Jones. 1 Willie Jones is 
also said to have advised him to offer his services to 
Congress, and accordingly in 1775 he was appointed navy 
lieutenant. As a privateer he became, as is well known, 
a terror to British merchantmen and British ports. The 
French Archives contain a curious manuscript in which 
he gives, for the information of Louis XVI., a minute 
account of his exploits during the American War of 
Independence. He evidently wrote the narrative in 
English, and then had it translated into French and 
transcribed in a plain round hand. 2 The subjoined 
passages, relating to Lord Selkirk's plate, are, therefore, 
not in his own words, but have undergone a double 
translation. They are, however, curious as being his own 
unpublished version of an affair in which, as usual, he 
did not fail to sound a trumpet before him : — 

Returning on board the Ranger, the wind being favourable, I 
sailed for the Scottish coast. My intention was to capture the Earl 
of Selkirk and detain him as a hostage agreeably to the plan of 
which I have already spoken [reprisals for the Act of Parliament of 

1 According, however, to his latest biographer, Mr. Buell, he took the name 
for the purpose of inheriting a plantation, which, by the process of adoption, was 
common in his time. Jones, he says, permanently settled in Virginia in March 
1773. Prior to that date, as a seafaring man, he had never spent three months 
together ashore. He left the command of a ship called the Two Friends to settle 
on a plantation in Virginia on the south side of the Rappahannock. 

2 According to Andre, the translator, five copies were made, the other four 
being for the ministers, and Andre published a portion of it in 1 798. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 75 

February 1776, declaring American prisoners traitors, pirates, and 
felons, and for the refusal of a cartel of exchange]. Accordingly 
the same day [23rd April 1778], about noon, having with me in a 
single boat only two officers and a small guard, I landed on that 
nobleman's estate. On landing I met some of the inhabitants, 
who, taking me for an Englishman, told me that Lord Selkirk was 
then in London, but that my lady, his wife, and several lady friends 
were at home. This made me resolve to return immediately to my 
boat and go back to the Ranger. This moderate conduct was not 
to the taste of my men, who were inclined to pillage, burn, and 
devastate all they could. Though this would have been making 
war after the fashion of the English, I did not think it fit to imitate 
them, especially on this occasion, considering what was due to a 
lady. It was necessary, however, to find some compromise to 
satisfy the cupidity of my crew, and to spare Lady Selkirk. I had 
only a moment for choice. What seemed to me best to reconcile 
everything was to order the two officers to go to the mansion with 
my guard, which was to remain outside under arms, while they alone 
entered. They were then politely to ask for the family plate, to 
stay only a few minutes, to take what was given them without 
demanding anything more, and return immediately afterwards with- 
out proceeding to any search. I was strictly obeyed. The plate 
was given up. Lady Selkirk told the officers several times over 
that she was very sensible of the moderation shown by me. She 
even wished to come to the beach, a mile from her mansion, to 
invite me to dine with her, but the officers begged her not to take 
the trouble to do this. . . . When circumstances forced me to 
allow my men to demand and take Lady Selkirk's plate, I was 
resolved on redeeming it at my own expense when it was sold, and 
on restoring it to that lady. On reaching Brest, therefore, my first 
care was to write her a touching letter, in which I explained the 
motives of my expedition and the cruel necessity in which the 
conduct of the English in America had placed me of inflicting 
retaliation. This letter was sent in an envelope addressed to the 
Postmaster-General in London, so that it might be shown to the 
King of England and his Ministers, and the Court of London was 
constrained to renounce the sanguinary Act of its Parliament, and 
to exchange these Americans, "traitors, pirates, and felons," for 
prisoners of war whom I had captured and brought to France. . . . 
During the war I found no means of returning to the Countess of 
Selkirk the family plate, which I had been forced to let my men 
carry off at the time of my expedition in Scotland in the Ranger. 



76 PARIS IN 1789-94 

I redeemed this plate from my men at a very high price. They 
fancied they could not make me pay too dearly for it. I had calcu- 
lated on sending it from Lorient by sea when that place became an 
open port, but, finding no opportunity, I wrote to the Comte de 
Vergennes for permission to send the plate from Lorient to Calais 
by land. That Minister considered my letter, and sent it on to 
M. de Calonne, who not merely granted me the permission I 
desired, but wrote me a very complimentary letter. The plate was 
consequently forwarded to London, and delivered carriage free at 
the address given by the Earl of Selkirk. I received from that 
nobleman a letter full of gratitude for the delicacy of my conduct 
and the strict discipline of my men. 

In an appendix Paul Jones gives in the original English 
his letters to and from Lord and Lady Selkirk, most, if not 
all, of which were published at the time of the restoration 
of the plate in 1784. They show how he assured Lady 
Selkirk, writing from Brest on the 8th of May 1778, that he 
" waged no war against the fair," but fully intended restitu- 
tion ; how Lord Selkirk sent a reply, which was stopped by 
the English Post-Office and returned to him ; how Lord 
Selkirk then transmitted a message to the effect that he 
would accept the plate if restored by Congress or any public 
body, but could not think of being indebted to Paul Jones's 
private generosity ; and how, after the restitution, Lord 
Selkirk assured Jones that his men stayed only a quarter of 
an hour in the butler's pantry while the butler was collect- 
ing the plate, and that they behaved very politely. In a 
letter to an Amsterdam dignitary, also appended, Paul Jones 
says, " I never had any obligation to Lord Selkirk, nor does 
he know me or mine except by character." l 

We can compare Paul Jones's account with that of Lady 
Selkirk, who, in a letter dated St. Mary's Isle, April 25, 1778, 
says : — 

The visit we had on Thursday was by no means desirable, but I 
have the satisfaction to be able to assure my friend that I neither 
was alarmed at the time nor have suffered in the least degree since. 
They took pains to let themselves be understood a press-gang till 

1 London Times, March 26, 1894.. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 77 

they had surrounded the house and the principal one had asked 
for me. I went down without scruple ; they informed me what 
they were, and their order was to take my lord prisoner, or if he 
was absent to demand the plate. I was so sensible of the mercy it 
was that my lord was absent that I never hesitated about the other. 
I apprehended the consequence of a refusal or a search to be so 
much worse that I would not permit the servants to conceal, as they 
meant to do. I must confess I now regret that, as I might have 
saved some of the best, for it came afterwards to be firmly believed 
that they were much alarmed, but at the time that was not observed, 
and could not otherwise be learned, as nobody was permitted to 
leave the house. 

Further on she says : — 

I am sure I behaved at the time with the most perfect com- 
posure, I may say even indifference, and did what I then thought 
best. . . . The only real concern which I cannot remove is to 
think that my lord must be affected if he hears this before he hears 
from me. 

She states, also, that — 

The people really behaved very civilly. . . . The youngest of the 
officers was a civil-looking lad in American uniform, but it seems 
he had a blue greatcoat as a disguise. He meddled little. The 
other, dressed in blue, behaved civilly, but with so confident a look 
and so saucy a manner that I dare say he could have been very 
rough had he seen it necessary. 1 

It may be added that Lord Selkirk's son, Lord Dare, 
met Jones by accident at Gouverneur Morris's house in Paris 
in 1791, and acknowledged the politeness shown by him as 
to the plate. 2 

Paul Jones's memoir was probably written in 1780, 
when he arrived in Paris and was presented to Louis XVI. 
Grimm says : — 

He has been frantically applauded at all the theatres where he 
has appeared, particularly at the Opera. A singularity worthy of 

1 Dumfries Courier, March 1894. 

2 " Diary of Gouverneur Morris." 



78 PARIS IN 1789-94 

remark is that this brave corsair, who has given such manifold 
proofs of the firmest soul and the most resolute courage, is never- 
theless the mildest and most susceptible of men, that he has com- 
posed many verses full of grace and sweetness, and that elegy and 
pastoral are the kind of poetry which seem to have the most 
attraction for him. The Nine Sisters' [Freemasons] lodge, of 
which he is a member, has engaged M. Houdon to make his 
bust. This portrait is a fresh masterpiece worthy of the chisel 
which seems destined to consecrate illustrious men of all kind 
to immortality. 1 

The bust figured in the Salon of 1781. Jones entered 
the French service and continued in it till the peace of 
1783. He then remained in Paris till 1787 or the beginning 
of 1788, for his name is in the directory of the latter year 
as living at 20 rue Royale. In 1788, after a visit to 
Denmark, he repaired to Russia and commanded a divi- 
sion in the battle in the Black Sea on the 7th June 
1788, by which the Turkish fleet was destroyed. According 
to the prince of Nassau Siegen, who served under him, 
Paul Jones in these new surroundings was timorous and 
unfit for any chief command. 2 The prince also found him 
extremely jealous, and this failing had struck Chaumont, 
Franklin's host at Passy. Chaumont, the secret inter- 
mediary between Franklin and the French Government, 
equipped five of the vessels with which Jones terrified 
the British coasts, yet Jones was habitually jealous and 
suspicious of him, though he eventually apologised. 3 
Jones quarrelled with Prince Potemkin, the Russian naval 
commander, and on his return to St. Petersburg mor- 
tifications befell him. The Scotchmen in the Russian 
navy objected to serve under a man regarded by them as 
a renegade and pirate, the Russian officers disliked him 
as a foreign upstart, and a trap was laid for him, a girl 
being sent to his lodgings that she might charge him 
with an indecent assault. S6gur, the French envoy, who, 

1 Grimm, Correspondance, xii. 394. 

2 Aragon, Un Paladin dans le \& me Stick. 

3 Century Magazine, March 1888. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 79 

as a fellow-member of the Order of Cincinnatus, had 
always befriended Jones, convinced the Empress of his 
innocence, and he was readmitted to the Court ; but, 
thoroughly disgusted, he obtained permission to quit 
Russia on a pension. Ineffectually offering his services 
to Sweden and Austria, he found his way back to Paris, 
though Gouverneur Morris, writing to him at Warsaw 
in November 1789, had dissuaded him from returning 
to a place "where neither pleasure nor advantage can 
be expected." According to the Esprit des Gazettes he 
went thither on purpose to see the Federation, and was 
recognised by a grenadier of St. Margaret, who led him 
in triumph to the district, and the latter took him under 
its protection. 

Jones is heard of again on the 17th October 1790, when 
a pamphlet in his name was addressed to the people of 
Lyons. He reproached them with their apathy for the 
Revolution and the bad organisation of their National 
Guards. In a postscript he professes to have visited 
Lyons since writing the letter, and deplores the absence 
of cockades. But it strikes me that this was all written 
by Robert Pigott and published in Jones's name, doubt- 
less with his consent, in order to carry more weight. 
There is no trace of Jones having visited Lyons in 1790, 
whereas Pigott was about that time a resident there. 
In February 1791 Jones consulted Gouverneur Morris 
on a scheme for an attack by Russia on British India, 
and he sent this through Grimm to the Empress Catherine ; 
but her reply to Grimm was that he was quarrelsome, that 
he had been allowed two years' absence to escape a trial 
for rape, and that British India was too remote to stand 
for anything in a European conflict. Jones was thus 
left to vegetate on an apparently meagre pension, and 
notification of his appointment as American consul at 
Algiers is said to have arrived too late. He died of 
dropsy on the 18th July 1792 at 42 rue de Tournon, a 
narrow street close by St. Sulpice. Morris had called 
that morning to draw up his will, but on going again in 



80 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the afternoon, the Queen's physician, Vicq d'Azyr, ac- 
companying him, found him dead. Morris was executor. 
The death was notified to the Assembly on the following 
day by Colonel Blackden, of whom we shall presently 
speak. He stated that application had been made (ap- 
parently by Jones's landlord) to Simonneau to bury him 
gratuitously under the regulation still in force for Pro- 
testant interments, but that Simonneau, indignant, had 
offered, if the expense was not otherwise defrayed, to 
bear it himself. Thereupon a deputy proposed, as a 
demonstration of religious liberty, that the Assembly 
should be represented at the funeral. This was agreed 
to, and here is the record of the interment : — 

This day, the 20th of July 1792, year 4 of Liberty and 1 of 
Equality, at 8 o'clock in the evening, conformably to the decree of 
the National Assembly of yesterday, in presence of the deputation 
of the said Assembly, consisting of MM. Brun, president of the 
deputation of the said Assembly, Bravet, Cambon, Rouyer, Brival, 
Deydier, Gay Vernon, bishop of the department of Haute-Vienne, 
Chabot, episcopal vicar of the department of Loir-et-Cher, Carlier, 
Petit, Le Josne, Robouame, and of a deputation of the Consistory 
of the Protestants of Paris, consisting of MM. Marron, pastor, 1 
Perreau, Benard, Monquin, and Empaytaz, elders, there was buried 
in the cemetery of foreign Protestants, John Paul Jones, a native of 
England and citizen of the United States of America, commodore 
in the service of the said States, aged 45, deceased the 18th of this 
month at his residence situate rue de Tournon, No. 42, on account 
of dropsy on the chest, in the sentiments of the Protestant religion. 
The said burial effected in the presence of us, Pierre Francois 
Simonneau, king's commissary on this behalf, and commissary 
of police of section Ponceau, and in that of Mr. Samuel Blackden, 
colonel of dragoons in the service of the State of North Carolina, 
James C. Mountflorence, formerly major in the service of the State 
of North Carolina, and citizen of the United States of America; 
Marie Jean Baptiste Benoist Beaupoil, French ex-officer, living at 
Paris, passage des Petits Peres, No. 7, and of Louis Nicolas 
Villeminot, officer commanding the detachment of gendarmerie 

1 Who delivered an address. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 81 

grenadiers, who escorted the deputation of the Assembly, and of 

others who have signed with us. 

Brun, Gay Vernon, bishop and deputy, Deydier, deputy 
of the Ain, Rouyer, Frangois Chabot, Bdnard, Petit, 
deputy, J. C. Mountflorence, Cambon fils aine, Bravet, 
Beaupoil, P. H. Carlier, Duevesque, Lafontaine, Simon- 
neau, Jacques Brival, Villeminot, Robouame, deputy, 
Marron, Perreau, Monquin, Empaytaz, R. Ghiselin, of 
Maryland, S. Blackden, Griffith, of Philadelphia. 1 

Jones, as I have said, named Gouverneur Morris as 
his executor. His sister and universal legatee, Mrs. Janet 
Taylor, went over from Scotland to claim his property. 
She was accompanied, as I am informed, by Madame Gour- 
bault {nee Marion Stewart Lowden), his grand-daughter, by 
Mark Lowden, her brother-in-law, husband of her sister 
Mary Anne, and on the 17th March 1793 they petitioned 
the Convention for arrears of pay or pension due to Jones 
from the French Government. The claim was referred to 
a committee, and a fortnight later they presented a second 
petition, with what result does not appear. 

The cemetery of foreign Protestants, in which Jones 
was buried, was a court and garden now covered by Nos. 
41 to 47 of the rue des Ecluses St. Martin. 2 In the summer 
of 1899 the American Government, at the instance of the 
Historical Society, instructed Mr. Vignaud, first secretary 
of the Paris Embassy, to ascertain the site, with a view, if 
possible, to the transfer of Jones's ashes to the United 
States, with which hope he had desired a leaden coffin, and 
at the time I write there is an idea of purchasing and demol- 
ishing the buildings so as to make a search. It is thought 
that Jones may have been buried in his uniform, the buttons 
of which might be discovered, or that the coffin had a metal 
plate inscribed with his name. The spot would eventually 
be converted into a public square and named after Jones. 

Colonel Blackden, who had served in the War of 

1 Correspondance Litteraire, March 20, 1859; Atlantic Monthly, May 1890. 
The original document perished by the burning down of the Paris Hotel de Ville 
in May 1871. 

2 Bulletin Soc. Hist, de Protestantisvie, December 1S99. 

F 



82 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Independence, was intimate with Barlow. They lodged 
together in December 1792 at the hotel Bretagne, rue 
Jacob, with their wives. The latter had as a companion, 
probably as an interpreter, Rachel Coope, wife of John 
Hurford Stone, 1 but they were deprived of her services in 
October 1793, when she was arrested with all the other 
English as hostages for Toulon. 

Of James Swan I have found additional particulars to 
those given in my " Glimpses of the French Revolution." 
Born at Dunfermline in 1765, he went as a youth to 
America. In February 1790 he was consulted, along with 
Gouverneur Morris and Colonel Benjamin Walker, by the 
French Government respecting the tobacco monopoly. 
On the 4th December 1791 he made an offer to the 
Assembly, on behalf of a company of merchants, to buy 
up the French claims for repayment of advances made 
during the War of Independence, by paying a lump sum 
down in lieu of the instalments. The offer was referred to 
the Finance Committee, but nothing came of it. Colonel 
Smith, later on, made a similar proposal. Morris describes 
Swan as a schemer who had, perhaps in this affair, made 
an unauthorised use of his name. On the 15th January 
1793 Swan contracted with the French Government to 
supply 30,000 barrels of pork, as also 100 hides|from Buenos 
Ayres or Brazil, and on the 19th September he received 
160,000 francs in payment of merchandise. 2 On the 20th 
December 1793, in concert with Barlow, Blackden, and 
Meavenworth, he presented an address to Beaubourg 
section. On the 27th December he contracted with the 
Government to supply gunpowder, saltpetre, and potash. 
On the 24th February 1794 he obtained leave to export to 
America articles of luxury to the amount of 100,000 francs, 
and on the 14th March he undertook to supply twelve or 
fifteen cargoes of American corn and pork. His partners in 
the latter affair were Parker and Huger, apparently the 
Huger whose hospitality Lafayette had enjoyed on first 
landing in America, and whose son tried subsequently to 

1 See p. 356. 2 A.F. ii. * 4 7 ; A.F. iv. 26. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 83 

effect Lafayette's escape from Olmutz. On the 5th October 
1794 he applied for passports for Dallard and Sonthonas, 
his clerks, who were to accompany him to America. Six 
days later he thus applied for a transfer of Sonthonas's 
passport to Schweizer, 1 his partner : — 

It is still more necessary to the service [of the Republic] that he 
[Sonthonas] should not go with me, so as to ensure my arrival 
without the possibility of being arrested on account of having a 
Frenchman with me, who unhappily, by special instructions of the 
English Government to privateers, is subject to being arrested by 
the first vessel. Moreover, I shall pass on board by another name, 
in order to dupe the English. 2 

Swan and Schweizer soon disagreed. According to a 
biography of the latter, by Hess, the French Government 
required an agent to purchase corn in America. Picque 
(probably Picquet, a member of the Convention) appointed 
Swan, but his want of reputation 3 necessitated the choice of 
a man commanding confidence to act with him. Schweizer, 
then a banker at Zurich, was accordingly coupled with 
Swan. Swan professed to be satisfied with this arrange- 
ment, but was incensed at not having sole charge. He 
went to America, entrusted with a large sum of money for 
making purchases. Schweizer followed him thither six 
months afterwards, but found that Swan ignored him. It 
is, of course, impossible for us to judge of the merits of 
the quarrel. Hess alleges that, on the agency being closed 
in 1803, in which year Swan returned to Paris, 1,500,000 
francs was declared due by France to Swan, and that 
Schweizer and Lubbert, who claimed their share, had to 
sue him, but that he preferred imprisonment to payment. 
Lubbert was a Hamburg merchant, who in 1793 contracted 
to supply wool to France. In the Paris directory of 1796 
Dallard, Swan & Co. are described as bankers, but a few 
years later Swan's name disappears. All we know for 
certain is that the litigation between Swan and Lubbert 

1 Schweizer' s stepmother was sister of Lavater, the physiognomist. 

2 A.F. ii. 31. 

3 Monroe, in a letter of the 30th June 1795, describes him as "a corrupt, un- 
principled rascal." 



84 PARIS IN 1789-94 

lasted twenty-two years. Hess gives an account of Swan's 
family, which must be taken subject to correction as that of 
an adversary. Swan, he says, married in 1776 Hepsy Clark, 
a handsome woman, strikingly resembling Marie Antoinette. 
Her father had left her a considerable sum, but her 
guardian had misappropriated a large portion of it. Swan's 
speculations in four years absorbed the rest of her dowry. 
They were not a harmonious pair, and the wife once threw 
a knife at her husband, but he coolly picked it up, returned 
it to her with a bow, and walked out of the room. Even- 
tually there was a separation. Husband, wife, and son, 
Hess alleges, were alike unscrupulous, but the three daughters 
were charming. One, Hepsy, married a Dr. Howard, and 
Schweizer, though he had left a wife in Paris, was fond 
of flirting with her. Kitty married a merchant named 
Sergeant. Sarah, born in 1782, married in 1802 William 
Sullivan, a lawyer, and grandson of General John Sullivan, 
who ranks next to Washington, 'Greene, and Putnam in the 
War of Independence. 

Swan's twenty-two years' imprisonment at St. Pelagie x 
is attributed by the Droit to his refusal to pay 625,640 
francs, as he maintained that he owed only 7000 or 8000 
francs. The Paris directory of 1828 describes him as a 
retired merchant, having a house at 61 rue de Richelieu, 
and this is apparently where his family resided. According 
to Auslandy a German review (1835), Swan was the only 
debtor of St. Pelagie who was allowed the use of the top 
balcony, which commanded a fine view of Paris. He 
would not, however, permit his cell to be decorated in any 
way. He possessed 5000 or 6000 francs a year, and on 
receiving instalments spent the money in feasting friends of 
both sexes. He had four mistresses, two of them sisters, 
both of whom had children by him. He liked the smell of 
blackberries, and actually bathed in their juice till the skin 

1 It was not his first imprisonment, for in August 1800 he had been incar- 
cerated for eleven days in the Temple, apparently as a suspected spy. We owe 
to the record of this (F. 7, 3305) the date and place of his birth, and a description 
of him as having a high forehead, blue eyes, a well-shaped nose, a round chin, 
and chestnut hair. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 85 

seemed saturated, then wiped the juice partly off, put on a 
clean shirt, and went to bed. All this sounds apocryphal, 
in spite of the confirmation of the Augsburg Allgemeine 
Zeitung (December 31, 1838), which states that the account 
was written by a lady who had known him. On the 18th 
July 1830 the litigation was still pending, and Swan had no 
expectation of release, for in a letter in indifferent French 
preserved in the archives of Nantes, addressed to a M. 
Gayard, he says : — 

Please excuse my importunity in begging you to see M. de 
Belleyme [president of the civil tribunal of the Seine] and thank him 
for me if he will you what days he presides this week, when I 
wish my little affair to be heard. I call it little because it takes 
only a quarter of an hour, but it is serious for me, for it will bring 
me at once 750,000 francs. As it relates to my previous affair with 
Redern, M. de Belleyme understands it better than I do, and his 
justice will do the rest. With respect and esteem, your devoted 
servant, James Swan, of Boston. 

Lubbert was a Dutchman, and if he was so pertinacious 
a litigant it should be known that he had been ruined by 
Napoleon's continental blockade against England. He had 
married Theodora, sister of the famous singer, Garat, and 
in 1794 he had a son, Emile, born at Bordeaux. The uncle, 
Joseph Lubbert Garat, who, as Minister of Justice in 1793, 
read to Louis XVI. his sentence of death, and whom 
Napoleon made a count and a director of the Bank of 
France, obtained for his grand nephew, young Lubbert, 
on the father being ruined, the post of inspector of lot- 
teries. The young man, who was a composer, became in 1827 
director of the Paris Opera, and in 1828 inspector also 
of Court entertainments. The Revolution of 1830, which 
released his father's creditor, brought ill-luck to Emile 
Lubbert, for the new Government, to avoid chronic deficits 
at the Opera, adopted the system of leasing it. Thus losing 
his position, he became lessee of the Opera Comique, but 
this proved disastrous. He accordingly went to Egypt, 
turned Mussulman, and was a sort of Clerk of the Revels, 



86 PARIS IN 1789-94 

amusement manager, to Mehemet Ali and Abbas Pasha. 
He died at Cairo in 1859. 

Curiously enough, Swan, while in prison in 181 2, was a 
suitor, together with Schweizer, against their former Paris 
agent Parker, and procured his arrest. For a few days 
they occupied adjoining cells at St. Pelagie, but Parker 
speedily obtained release. 1 

Revolutions sometimes benefit captive debtors. Just as 
the debtors at La Force were set free on the 13th July 
1789, so the debtors at St. Pelagie were liberated by the 
revolution of 1830. The story that Swan was on his way 
back to prison, voluntarily to resume captivity after a few 
days of liberty, when he dropped down dead in the street, 
must be dismissed as a legend. He died on the 18th March 
183 1, and the Allgemeine Zeitung speaks mysteriously of 
that death as happening under circumstances which could 
not decently be mentioned. Nothing more is heard of a 
younger brother David, whom Swan is said to have sent 
for from Scotland to carry on Bible-printing and other 
speculations. 

It is needless to give a sketch of Joel Barlow, army 
chaplain, barrister, emigration agent, ambassador, and poet to 
boot. It is sufficient to mention incidents of his life in Paris, 
some of which have escaped the notice of his biographers. 
In 1788 he went thither as agent for the Scioto colonisation 
scheme. He issued a glowing prospectus, and Brissot, 
though unacquainted with this new Eden, was induced to 
endorse it. The Paris office was besieged with applicants, 
enticed by the offer of a free passage, three years' provi- 
sions in return for draining and clearing, and at the end 
of that time the gift of fifty acres and a cow. Duval 
d'Espremenil and the marquis de Lezay Marn6sia entered 
warmly into the scheme, thinking to create in America a 
refuge for impoverished royalists. About 500 emigrants 
went over to Gallipolis, as the settlement was termed, in 
1791, but, being chiefly artisans from Paris and Lyons, 
they were indifferent pioneers, and they were rudely 

1 Souvenirs de Berryer (father of the Legitimist orator). 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 87 

disillusioned. Indian attacks, malarial fever, and other evils 
assailed them. The company, moreover, whether from 
fraud or mismanagement, was in difficulties, and stopped 
the supply of rations. Its allegation was that it had been 
cheated by agents in France, who had run off to England 
with the money. 1 This would seem to refer to Barlow, 
but it would be unfair to condemn him on so vague a 
charge. He had, however, quitted Paris for London, 
leaving as his deputy William Playfair, brother of the 
eminent Scotch professor and geologist. Yvet, a teacher 
of languages, complained to the Palais Royal section in 
January 1791 that Playfair would neither refund his money 
nor give him information. Playfair, harassed by intending 
emigrants who had paid down money and could get no 
equivalent, also left for London in the autumn of 1792. 
Marnesia meanwhile, in despair, recrossed the Atlantic, 
but Congress consoled the ninety surviving or remaining 
emigrants by a grant of 24,000 acres on Little Sandy river. 
Barlow, as we shall see, 2 returned to Paris in November 
1792 as co-delegate with John Frost of the London 
Corresponding Society, to present an address to the Con- 
vention. He also, through Paine, presented it with his 
pamphlet on the French constitution, 3 whereupon Guyton 
Morveau proposed that citizenship should be conferred 
on him. This was referred to a committee. Meanwhile 
Barlow accompanied to Savoy Bishop Gregoire and the 
three other deputies sent thither by the Convention to 
arrange for the annexation of that province to France, 
and Gregoire, who was intimate with and had doubtless 
invited him, speaks of his having " summoned the Pied- 
montese to the enjoyment of liberty." Barlow, indeed, 
had published in French an "Address to the People of 
Piedmont on the advantages of the French Revolution." 
He published in 1795 the English text. On the 17th 
February 1793, while still "preaching liberty" in Savoy, he 
was declared a French citizen 4 and was legally naturalised, 

1 J. S. C. Abbott, " History of Ohio." 3 See p. 329. 

3 Dated London, Sept. 26, 1792. * A.D. ii. 34. 



88 PARIS IN 1789-94 

a formality not apparently accomplished in the case of 
Cloots and Paine. Barlow's wife had remained in Paris. 
On the 16th May 1793, at the trial of General Miranda, 
Barlow, though not acquainted with him, testified that 
common friends in London highly esteemed him. Paine 
was likewise a witness for the defence, and Miranda was 
acquitted. Barlow, as we shall see, 1 was one of the 
eighteen Americans who vainly solicited Paine's release. 
He lodged for a time at White's hotel, and afterwards at 
the hotel de Bretagne, rue Jacob, but enriched, as is said, 
by commercial speculations — not, let us hope, by the 
Scioto company — he purchased a fine house (now lately 
demolished) in the rue de Vaugirard, which became, and 
long continued to be, the American Legation. In 1795 
foe went as American consul to Algiers, and effected the 
release of American captives. Coming back to Paris, he 
spent eight years there in a private capacity. In October 
1802 he and his wife attended a birthday dinner given at 
Paris to General Kosciusko, the Polish patriot. In that year 
he applied to the British embassy at Paris for a passport 
for England, but did not use it, having also an American 
one. In 1805 he returned to America, but in 181 1 re- 
crossed the Atlantic to be ambassador to France. In 
181 2, on his way to Wilna to sign a treaty with Napoleon, 
he became involved in the retreat of the French army, and 
, died from cold and privation at Yarmisica. 2 According to 
Lewis Goldsmith, Barlow in 1802 styled Napoleon "the 
ff butcher of liberty, the greatest monster that Nature ever 
spewed." 3 

Taney was probably a son of the eminent jurist, 
member of the Maryland House of Delegates, who was 
educated at St. Ouen and Bruges Catholic colleges. Contee, 
a Baltimore man, was probably the uncle or cousin of 
Alexander Contee Hanson (1749-1806), who was at one 
time secretary to Washington, and afterwards Chancellor 
of Maryland. Contee in March 1791 complained of having 

1 See p, 03. 2 C. B. Todd, " Life of Barlow." 

a Anti-Gallican Monitor, Jan. 17, 1813. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 89 

been robbed at a gaming-house of 146 louis. He was 
again in France, as a merchant at Bordeaux, in 1810. 
Jarvis, who had returned to New York, contracted on the 
23rd February 1794 to supply France with 225 sheets of 
tin. Of Howell I can learn nothing. 

William Henry Vernon, styled on account of his im- 
posing appearance "Count" Vernon, came from Rhode 
Island. He was the spokesman of the deputation, and 
was a friend of Lafayette. In 1778 his father, William 
Vernon, of the Continental Navy Board, sent him to France, 
asking John Adams, a fellow-passenger, to act as a kind 
of guardian to him. Young Vernon, by Adams's advice, 
studied French grammar on the voyage, but remained at 
Bordeaux, while Adams went on to Paris. Samuel Meeke, 
afterwards a satellite of " Egalite," in an unpublished diary 
of 1782-83, 1 speaks of Vernon, then at Paris, as " an 
American beau, an agreeable man, who had been some 
years at Bordeaux." Vernon, who was then twenty-four years 
of age, was staying at the hotel de Tours. On one occasion 
he took Meeke and his wife back to their hotel in his 
carriage, and " stayed and ate peaches with us ; this was 
all our supper. In conversation, as it always happens, we 
found several of our acquaintances were his also." On 
a second call Vernon "talked much of the American war, 
which is the hinge of all their (Americans') conversations. 
It is true they have suffered much." Vernon, mistaken 
by the Paris mob for an aristocrat, was once in danger 
of strangulation at a lamp-post, but a French friend cleared 
up the mistake. The dispersion of art treasures in the 
Revolution enabled him to take back to America a fine 
collection of paintings. He died at Newport in 1833. 

Thomas Appleton was a descendant of Samuel Apple- 
ton, who emigrated in 1635 from Little Waldingfield, 
Suffolk, to Ipswich, New England. His father, Nathaniel, 
was commissioner of loans for Massachusetts. He was 
doubtless one of the two Boston Appletons who went to 
France about 1790, expecting to make their fortune by 

1 T. 779. 



90 PARIS IN 1789-94 

working the process of a Scotch chemist, Pew or Pugh, 
for converting common oil into spermaceti. 1 He remained 
in Paris during the Terror, and was lodging with a school- 
master in the Thermes de Julien section in the autumn of 
1793 when his letters and other effects were sealed up. 
He was apparently mistaken for an Englishman, but on 
proving his nationality the seals were removed. 2 He was 
ultimately American consul at Leghorn, where he died, 
leaving no issue. His brother John settled at Calais, was 
appointed American consul there in 1792, and was the 
father of John James, American minister to Sweden 1827- 
1837, who died at Rennes, France, in 1864. John James's 
son, Monsieur Charles Louis Appleton, born at Rennes in 
1846, is now professor of Roman law at Lyons, and his son, 
Monsieur John Appleton, also professor of the law faculty 
there, has dramatised in French Longfellow's " Evangeline," 
and has published a volume of poems. 3 A cousin of 
Thomas Appleton lived at Havre during the Revolution, 
and purchased some crown lands there. In 1802-3 
four Boston Appletons — Joseph, aged 43 ; John, 40 ; 
George William, 30 ; and Nathan, 20 — went to Paris, 4 and 
doubtless visited their kinsmen in France. 

Of William Harrison I can learn nothing. James 
Anderson was probably the man who in 1804, in con- 
junction with Thomas Stone, took out a patent for a 
spinning-machine, and in 1810, in partnership with 
Coquerel and Legras, a patent for printing on porcelain. 

It is disappointing to find only three out of these 
twelve Americans men of any celebrity. Even in those 
three cases, moreover, the celebrity is not entirely enviable. 
Jones was an adventurer, ready to serve any Government 
for pay. Barlow, a J ack-of -all-trades, perhaps master of 
none, certainly not of poetry, possibly enriched himself 
by the Scioto Land Company, which brought ruin and 
woe to others. Swan is famous only for his imprisonment. 

1 Todd, " Life of Barlow." 2 F 7, 2511. 

3 These two gentlemen have kindly furnished me information on their 
collateral ancestor. 4 F 7*, 2231. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 91 

It is still more disappointing to find that not one of the 
twelve committed to paper his experiences and impressions 
of the Revolution. We are thus left without any American 
eye-witness's account of that thrilling period. 

More than three years elapsed before an American 
deputation again waited on the Convention. Thomas 
Paine's arrest was the occasion of it. Robespierre, in the 
notebook noticed hereafter, 1 had resolved, indeed, to 
propose to the Convention that Paine should be put on 
trial, but that entry was made in October 1793, and 
Robespierre, for reasons which can only be conjectured, 
must have changed his mind. It is the only indication 
of change of purpose to be gathered after the notebook. 
Paine, by the advice of Danton, had discontinued attending 
the Convention since the proscription of the Girondins at 
the end of May, and had prudently effaced himself, not 
even drawing his stipend of eighteen francs a day after the h 
middle of September 1793 ; but on the 25th December 
Barere, on behalf of the Public Safety Committee, proposed 
to the Convention the exclusion of foreigners. This was 
specially aimed at Cloots, whom Robespierre had already 
expelled from the Jacobin club, but it applied also to 
Paine, whom Bourdon (de l'Oise) accused of intriguing 
with an ex-employe of the Foreign Office. The decree of 
August 1792 conferring citizenship on Cloots and Paine 
was thus virtually rescinded, and if they belonged to 
countries at war with France they became liable to arrest. 
This was clearly the case with Cloots, a Prussian subject ; 
but was Paine an Englishman or an American ? In England 
he was certainly regarded as a British subject, and had 
been outlawed as such, but in America he had undoubtedly 
acquired citizenship. The General Security Committee, 
however, on the 27th December 1793, ordered the arrest 
both of Cloots and Paine, consigning the execution of the 
order to two of its secretaries, Martin and Lasny, and to 
the Unity or Quatre Nations section, in which Cloots re- 
sided at the hdtel de Modene. Accordingly the secretaries 

1 See p. 485. 



92 PARIS IN 1789-94 

and two commissaries (Dodet and Gillet) went on the 
night of the 28th and first apprehended Cloots, whether 
at that hotel or in the rue de M^nars, where he seems to 
have kept a mistress, is not clear. They then at 3 a.m. 
repaired to White's hotel, passage des Petits Peres, which 
was still Paine's formal address, though he had removed, 
as we have seen, in the previous spring to 63 faubourg 
St. Denis. He happened, however, to be sleeping at 
White's that night, on account of dining there with some 
friends. The landlord showed them up to Paine's bed- 
room, and acted as interpreter. They understood Paine to 
say that his papers were at Barlow's, hotel de la Grande 
Bretagne, in the rue Jacob. On taking Paine thither, 
however, Barlow explained that he had returned to the 
printer a proof of the first sheet of the " Age of Reason," 
and the commissaries, after a search, were satisfied that he 
had none of Paine's papers. Anyhow, Paine afterwards 
explained that his real residence was in the faubourg St. 
Denis, and there consequently the commissaries took him, 
Barlow accompanying them. They found nothing there to 
require sealing, though this formality was subsequently 
accomplished. Barlow had taken charge of the manuscript 
of the "Age of Reason," and they then completed their 
mission by conducting Paine to the Luxembourg. 

Whether Cloots was carried about with Paine from 
White's to Barlow's, thence to the faubourg St. Denis, 
and finally to the Luxembourg, is not clear, but B6noit, 
the Luxembourg keeper, gave one receipt for the two 
prisoners. Paine says, in his third Letter to American 
Citizens, 1802 : — 

There were two foreigners in the Convention, Anacharsis Cloots 
and myself. We were both put out of the Convention by the same 
vote, arrested by the same order, and carried to prison together the 
same night. . . . Joel Barlow was with us when we went to prison. 1 

The secretaries and commissaries may possibly have 
taken both prisoners to the Luxembourg after the visit to 

1 Conway's " Writings of Paine," iii. 395. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 93 

Barlow's, when, requiring food and rest, they suspended 
proceedings from 7 till 11 a.m., and, leaving Cloots in 
prison, they may have taken Paine alone to the faubourg 
St. Denis and back ; yet it is unlikely that Paine, on once 
entering the prison, was allowed to leave it. 

Paine's arrest naturally made a stir among his fellow- 
Americans, and on the 27th January 1794 eighteen of them *J 
repaired to the Convention to solicit his release. They 
comprised William Jackson, of Philadelphia; J. [Joseph] 
Russell, of Boston ; Peter Whiteside, of Philadelphia ; 
Henry Johnson, of Boston ; Thomas Carter, of Newbury 
Port ; Samuel Cooper, of Philadelphia ; Jno. Willett Bil- 
lopp, of New York ; Thomas Waters Griffith, of Baltimore ; 
Thomas Ramsden, of Boston ; Samuel P. Broome, of New 
York ; A. Meavenworth, of Connecticut ; Joel Barlow, of 
Connecticut; Michael Alcorn, of Philadelphia; M[ichael] 
O' Mealy, of Baltimore; John Macpherson, of Alexandria, 
Virginia ; William Hoskins, of Boston ; J. Gregorie, of 
Petersburg, Virginia ; and Joseph Ingraham, of Boston. 

How the deputation offered to be sureties for Paine's 
conduct in France ; how President Vadier, one of the very 
men who had ordered his arrest, spoke of him in reply as 
an Englishman by birth and consequently liable to arrest, 
and as having misunderstood the French revolution ; how 
Gouverneur Morris wished Paine to remain a prisoner in 
order to prevent his return to America ; and how Paine, 
consequently, had to continue in captivity till Monroe 
superseded Morris, will be found fully narrated in Dr. Mon- 
cure Conway's exhaustive " Life and Works of Paine." x 
What should be noted is that Barlow is the only member 
of the first deputation who figures on the second. Paul 
Jones had died, and the others had evidently returned to 
America. Major Jackson, who drew up the petition and 
heads the second list, was doubtless the spokesman. Ac- 
cording to Morris, who, however, disliked him, Jackson 
counted for success on his influence with the Jacobins, but 
if so he was disappointed. This was his third visit to 

1 Putnam's Sons : " Life," 2 vols. ; " Works," 4 vols. 



94 PARIS IN 1789-94 

France, and he was perhaps fluent in the language. Hav- 
ing served in his youth in the War of Independence, he 
in 1781, at the age of twenty-one, accompanied Colonel 
John Laurens on his mission to Paris. On his return he 
was first aide-de-camp to Washington, and then Assistant 
Secretary of War under General Lincoln. After a second 
visit to Europe he practised law at Philadelphia. In 1787 
he was secretary to the Convention which framed the con- 
stitution, and he was Washington's secretary from 1789 to 
1793. He was now spending two years in the Old World. 
He returned home, to be surveyor of the port of Phila- 
delphia from 1796 to 1801, editor of a newspaper from 
1801 to 1815, and secretary of the Cincinnatus Society from 
1801 till his death in 1828. It was reported that by his 
advice Washington put an end to Morris's tenure of the 
Paris embassy, but Washington disclaimed having heard 
from him during his stay in Europe. 

Jackson and Russell, as also Francis Willing and Joseph 
Thibaut, were for a time, in January 1794, prisoners at 
their lodgings, but the General Security Committee, ascer- 
taining them to be irreproachable patriots, ordered their 
liberation. Jackson and his friends were probably the men 
of whom Rousselin, in a report to the Police Bureau on 
the 25th July 1794, says : — 

Several persons believed to be Anglo-Americans have excited 
suspicion. They frequently meet at a cafe and restaurant in the 
faubourg Germain. They are lavish with their money. The man 
who seems to be their leader lives in the ci-devant Fosses de Mon- 
sieur-le-Prince, maison d'Harcourt. 1 

Whiteside, a native of London, had witnessed a patent 
taken out there by Paine in 1788, and Paine had lost money 
by his bankruptcy. Whiteside continued to interest him- 
self in Paine, and by informing him of Monroe's arrival 
facilitated his liberation. A partner with Robert Morris at 
Philadelphia, Whiteside died there in 1828. With Morris 
and William Whiteside, his brother, he sent out the first 
trading-ship from America to the East Indies. 

1 F. 7, 4437. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 95 

Of Johnson, a shipowner ultimately naturalised in 
France, a singular episode may be related. Billaud Va- 
renne, the future Terrorist, in 1786 married Angelica Doye, 
a Westphalian, pensioned to the extent of 150 francs by 
the old monarchy as a convert to Catholicism. On his 
being sent to Cayenne in 1796, she vainly sought permission 
to join him. Left destitute, she obtained a divorce from 
Billaud in order to contract a platonic marriage with John- 
son, who had befriended her. Johnson was in bad health, 
and she seems to have calculated that on his early death 
she could profit by his money for rejoining Billaud. John- 
son, in fact, died in 1800, leaving her 500,000 francs. 1 
Billaud in the following year heard of the divorce and 
re-marriage, but without any extenuating circumstances, 
whereupon he broke off all correspondence with her and 
refused to open her letters. In 1803 she married a rich 
French merchant, Cousin Duparc, and she died in 1815. 
Billaud survived her four years. He amused himself in 
exile by breeding parrots. Driven from Cayenne in 1815, 
he ended his days in St. Domingo, regretting to the last 
Danton and Robespierre. 

Billopp was probably a son or nephew of Captain 
Christopher Billopp, of the British navy, who had a tract 
of land on Staten Island, which his daughter ultimately 
inherited. 

Griffith, a young merchant — he must not be confused 
with Richard Griffith or Griffiths, a translator of English 
books in Paris — was sent to the Madelonnettes prison on 
the 18th October 1793, for, having lost at Havre Morris's 
certificate of his American citizenship, he was taken for an 
Englishman. Producing, however, a certificate from Havre 
municipality, he was liberated on the 8th January 1794. 
He is doubtless the Griffith who, in partnership with Nick- 
lin(?), of Philadelphia, was owner of the New Jersey. That 
vessel, returning from China in 1797, was captured by a 
French cruiser and taken to Porto Rico, where General 
Hedonville condemned it as British, but allowed it to 

1 Begis, "Billaud Varenne." 



96 PARIS IN 1789-94 

proceed to its destination on payment of caution money. 
The Prize Court at Paris revised the decision, and Nicklin 
and Griffith claimed repayment of the caution money out 
of the sum paid by America to France for Louisiana ; but 
General Armstrong reduced their claim from .£100,000 to 
.£10,000, and it is not clear how the affair ended. Griffith, 
in 1798, published in French a pamphlet on American 
trade. 

Broome was a New York merchant, in partnership with 
his brother John, president of the New York Chamber of 
Commerce, and lieutenant-governor of the State. He died 
in 1810, and a street in New York bears his name. 
Meavenworth was probably the attorney, styled by Lewis 
Goldsmith Leavenworth, who complained of a heavy bad 
debt due to him by the French Government. Alcorn, on 
the 20th February 1794, asked permission to return with 
his vessel and cargo to America, on condition of bringing 
back wheat. The Convention referred his application to 
the Public Safety and Subsistence Committees. O'Mealy 
was still, or again, in Paris in 1804, when he left for 
Fecamp. 1 Hoskins, like Griffith, had been a prisoner. 
Landing at Calais in January 1794 in company with three 
Frenchmen, he was sent in custody to Paris, and was at 
the Luxembourg from the 7th to the 25th January. He 
was still living in or revisiting Paris in 1802. He is pro- 
bably the Bostonian whom a French fellow-prisoner 
describes as undertaking at La Force to master a savage 
mastiff kept by the jailor, which he did by plunging his 
fingers down its throat. Hoskins was still, or again, in 
Paris in 1803, and in 1810 another Hoskins, perhaps his 
son, twenty-five years of age, and a merchant at Amster- 
dam, was captured at sea by a Dunkirk cruiser on his way 
to England, but he represented that England was his 
easiest way to America, and he was released. 

Gregorie was a merchant at Dunkirk, who, in October 
1793, in concert with Henry Walter Livingstone, had 

1 B.B. 397. He had quitted the Franco-Irish legion after a duel with the 
adjutant-general, MacSheehy. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 97 

written from White's hotel to Robespierre, offering to 
import American wheat. In 1798 he published, anony- 
mously, in Paris a pamphlet in reply to Fauchet's allega- 
tions that the United States were dependent on trade with 
England and might again become her colonies. 1 Ingra- 
ham, who had previously visited France in 1779, was per- 
haps the father of Joseph Holt Ingraham, the clergyman 
and author. 

Although this deputation did not succeed in securing 
Paine's release, it probably, if there had been any danger H 
of his trial, averted it. Indeed Morris, whatever his com- 
plicity in his detention, would manifestly and justly have 
been held responsible in America had Paine's life been 
sacrificed. By being kept, moreover, all along at the 
Luxembourg, Paine was placed on a different footing from 
Cloots, who, as we have seen, on account of the agitation 
in the adjacent Cordeliers club for his release, was trans- 
ferred on the 7th March to St. Lazare. That club may 
unwittingly have done Paine a service by refusing on the 
19th February his request for its intervention. He re- 
mained at the Luxembourg till his release on the 4th 
November 1794. On the 8th December the Convention, 
on the motion of Thibaudeau, resolved : " That the repre- 
sentative of the people, Thomas Payne, 2 having been 
declared a French citizen by a decree of the Legislative 
Assembly, is not comprised in the law which excludes 
foreigners from the National Convention." The Con- 
vention, curiously enough, thus readmitted Paine by 
declaring that the law which had expelled him did not 
apply to him. This was the very ground taken by the 
unfortunate Cloots in going to the Convention next day, as 
though nothing affecting him had been passed. Yet the 
law, if it did not apply to Paine and Cloots, applied to 
nobody. 

1 He was probably the Gregorie who in 1805 obtained a passport for Phila- 
delphia (F. 7, 3750). 

2 This was all along the French way of spelling the name. 

G 



98 PARIS IN 1789-94 

If these two American deputations were unofficial, there 
was one audience of a different character. The Conven- 
tion, being the sole governing body, had to receive the 
credentials of newly-appointed foreign ministers. Gouver- 
neur Morris's successor, Monroe, who, curiously enough, 
had voted in the Senate against Morris's appointment, 
arrived just after the fall of Robespierre. On the 14th 
August 1794 he wrote to the president of the Convention, 
Merlin of Douai, to ask when and by whom he would be 
received. The Convention itself seems to have been 
puzzled, and referred the matter to the Public Safety Com- 
mittee, which reported that the Convention itself should 
receive Monroe, but without any of the absurd ceremonial 
of the monarchy, and that the president should give him 
the accolade fraternelle, in token of the friendship of the two 
nations. Accordingly on the following day Monroe with 
his staff, arriving in carriages requisitioned for the purpose 
by the Convention, entered amid loud plaudits and took 
his seat in front of the tribune. As he could not speak 
French, one of the secretaries of the Convention read a 
translation of his address and of the credentials from Wash- 
ington. These credentials, however, were inaccurately 
addressed not to the Convention but to the Public Safety 
Committee. The president then welcomed him, and 
Monroe, being led up the steps, received the fraternal kiss 
amid enthusiastic plaudits. He then sat among the depu- 
ties, and it was resolved that an American and a French 
flag, intertwined, should be placed in the hall. Cheers 
were given, first for the French and then for the American 
republic. 1 

On the 23rd August 1794 Reybaz, as minister for the 
republic of Geneva, had a similar reception. Merlin de 
Thionville, as president, spoke of the Genevese as descend- 
ants of William Tell, and the Genevese flag, it was resolved, 
should be hung up alongside the French and American 
colours. In November 1796, however, Reybaz received 

1 Moniteur, xxi. 496-500. 




THE TAKING OF THE BASTILLE 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 99 

twenty-four hours' notice to quit France. Again, on the 23rd 
April 1795 Baron de Stael, husband of the famous Madame 
de Stael, waited on the Convention as Swedish ambassador. 
He exchanged compliments with President Boissy d'Anglas, 
who gave him the republican accolade amid prolonged 
plaudits. 1 And on the 31st July 1795 Guerini, the Venetian 
ambassador, greeted with cheers for the two republics, 
appeared before the Convention, delivering a speech in 
which he boasted of the eleven centuries of liberty of 
Venice. 

In singular contrast with these diplomatic receptions is 
the appearance of three Quakers, who, entering with their 
hats on their heads on the 10th February 1791, must have 
puzzled and amused the Assembly. One was a French- 
man, Jean de Marsillac, who, having adopted Quaker 
principles, had quitted the army, had graduated in medi- 
cine at Montpellier, and subsequently wrote a life of 
Penn and a treatise on gout. 2 The others were William 
Rotch and his son Benjamin, Nantucket whale-fishers, who, 
harassed and ruined by the war of American Independence, 
had settled in 1785 at Dunkirk, on promises of bounties, 
which were frustrated by the Revolution. 3 They had con- 
scientiously refused to fight in America ; they now found 
themselves rendered liable both to oaths and to military 
service in France. They pleaded for exemption, and 
cited Pennsylvania in proof that a community could 
exist without war. Mirabeau was then President of the 
Assembly, and he had no need, like most of his prede- 
cessors and successors, of having notice of deputations. 
He was always ready with a reply, and indeed he was 
burning the candle of life at both ends in the two months 
which remained to him. He held out a promise of exemp- 
tion from oaths, but he argued that self-defence was a duty, 



1 Monileur, xxiv. 293. 

2 When Bancal went to London in 1791 he took with him a letter of intro- 
duction from Marsillac to Bevan, the Quaker banker. 

3 Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 1893. 



ioo PARIS IN 1789-94 

that even Pennsylvanians must surely protect their families 
from Red Indians, that readiness for war ensured peace, and 
that a Quaker who allowed a fellow-man to be butchered 
by tyrants would be an accessory to the crime. The 
Quakers were silent, but probably not convinced. Their 
memorial was referred to the Constitution Committee, and 
nothing more is heard of it. On the 26th October 1793 
Benjamin Rotch again waited on the Convention to com- 
plain that the Dunkirk municipality had arrested some of 
the Nantucket whalers' wives as being Englishwomen. " I 
desire," he said in his letter to the President, "to appear at 
the bar of the Convention to present the enclosed petition 
in favour of the wives of Americans. As I belong to the 
Society of Friends, known by the name of Quakers, I hope 
that thou wilt permit me to present myself in the costume 
of that society. I flatter myself that thou wilt admit me as 
soon as possible, because there is nothing more precious 
than liberty, the object of the petition. Salut etfraternite!' 
Rotch was apparently allowed to keep on his hat, and the 
Convention ordered the release of these prisoners. 1 

The Quakers unconsciously set a precedent for two 
petitioners who, on the 20th December 1793, presented 
themselves with their hats, but Couthon and Robespierre 
objected to such incivility. Another deputy cited the 
precedent of 1791, but Robespierre rejoined that the 
exception proved the rule, and the rule was accordingly 
enforced. On the 15th September 1796, however, a hatted 
Quaker in the gallery of the Council of Elders was left 
unmolested. He may have been Marsillac. 

This was not the last appearance of Quakers in the 
Legislative precincts, for on the 15th September 1798, at 
the sitting of the Council of Five Hundred, President 
Marbot announced the presence in the gallery of a 
Quaker who desired permission, on religious grounds, to 

1 C. 279. Another of these emigrants, Francis Coffyn, in 1795 succeeded his 
father as American vice-consul at Dunkirk. An intercepted letter in 1797 led to 
his arrest, but he was speedily released. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 101 

remain covered. The President remarked that such per- 
mission would demonstrate the respect of the Council for 
religious convictions. A member, however, objected that 
one exception from the standing orders would lead to 
others. The Council accordingly " passed to the order 
of the day " ; in other words, it declined to consider 
the application, and the unfortunate Quaker probably 
withdrew. 

These French Quakers, living at or near Cong6nies, 
in the Cevennes, were descendants of the Camisards or 
Huguenot visionaries. They had adopted principles re- 
sembling Quakerism, but had no knowledge of George 
Fox and his followers till 1785, when two English Quakers, 
Dr. Edward Long Fox and Thomas Bland, visited Paris 
in order to offer restitution to the owners of certain French 
vessels captured by British vessels belonging to Quakers. 
They then heard of the existence of the Cevennes com- 
munity. This led to Marsillac being sent to London to 
form fraternal relations between the English Friends and 
their French co-religionists. A return visit was paid by 
Englishmen in 1788 to Congenies, at which the French 
community was induced to discard "hat-worship," the use 
of the second person, plural, and bright-coloured gar- 
ments. In 1791 Majolier went to England to study Quaker 
doctrines ; in 1797 William Savary and David Sands 
visited Congenies. Etienne Grellet, a native of France, 
who had emigrated to America and there turned Quaker, 
took part in 1809 in preventing Paine from having 
a Quaker burial at New York. Grellet also visited the 
Cevennes in 1807, 1813, and 1820. This little community 
is now almost extinct. 1 

Paoli, the Corsican liberator, was certainly the most, if 
not indeed the only, celebrated man who waited on the 
Assembly. On the 22nd April 1790 he headed a deputation 
of Corsicans, who had met him in Paris on his way home 
after twenty years' exile in England, and he declared this 
the happiest day of his life. France, he said, had loosed 

1 Jaulmes, Quakers Frattfais, 1898. 



102 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the fetters of Corsica. His entire life having been an oath 
to liberty, this was tantamount to having sworn to the 
new French Constitution. It only remained for him to 
swear fidelity to the nation which had adopted him, and to 
the sovereign whom he acknowledged. President Bonnay, 
in response, complimented Paoli as " the hero and martyr 
of liberty." 1 On the 17th June 1790 the Societe de 1789 
gave him dinner, when the market-women presented bou- 
quets to him, as also to Lafayette and to Talleyrand, " the 
only one of his class," they said, " who has remembered 
that we are all his brothers, and who has sacrificed his 
private interests to the public weal." 2 Three years later 
Paoli was summoned to the bar of the Convention to 
answer for his acts, but he wrote that his health did not 
allow him to take so long a journey, and in June the Con- 
vention, hoping he might yet be won over, rescinded the 
summons. Had he obeyed it he would in all probability 
have been guillotined. 

On the legal principle of cy-pres t Paoli leads us up to a 
woman not herself celebrated but having a celebrated 
father and brother. Among the suppliants for pecuniary 
aid was Charlotte Dusaillant, nee Mirabeau. On the 19th 
January 1794, appearing at the bar, she stated that her 
parents' pride and ambition forced her to become a nun, 
that though convents had been abolished she had not 
received the allowance voted to their former inmates, and 
that the annuity of 900 francs left her by her father had for 
two years been stopped. Her mother, moreover, was in 
prison. She begged for immediate help and the reference 
of her petition to the Liquidation Committee. A deputy 
vouched for her patriotism, assuring the Convention that 
intellectual vigour was the only point in which she re- 
sembled her brothers. (Mirabeau's secret relations with 
the Court had been discovered fourteen months before, 
and his remains had been ignominiously expelled from the 
Pantheon.) She had exhausted the liberality of her few 
friends, she was unable to obtain the certificate, without 

1 Moniteur, iv. 188. 2 Journal de la Socitte de 1 789. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 103 

which her pension as ex-nun was not payable, and if the 
Convention rejected her application it would be her 
sentence of death. The secret royalism of one brother and 
the professed royalism of the other apparently injured her 
cause, for on the 23rd February she reappeared, urging 
extreme poverty. This time the Convention voted her 600 
francs as temporary assistance. 1 On the 10th August 1796 
the Council of Five Hundred, on the petition of her 
husband and herself, adopted a decree enabling persons 
holding property jointly with emigres to realise their share, 
exempt from the confiscation falling on the rest. She 
subsequently, having perhaps inherited family property, 
renounced her pension. 

Mirabeau's sister naturally leads us to Rousseau's widow, 
Therese Levasseur, who had been allowed a pension of 
1200 francs, increased on the ground of age and infirmity 
to 1500 francs. On the 25th September 1794 she appeared 
before the Convention, offering two manuscripts entrusted 
to her by Rousseau an hour before his death, with a 
label prescribing that they were not to be opened till 
1801. She asked the Convention to take charge of 
them, and to decide whether they should be at once 
opened. The Education Committee reported next day 
that the label was not in Rousseau's writing, for it styled 
him " monsieur," a title which he would not have assumed, 
and that the manuscript was an autograph copy of 
the "Confessions," more complete than the published 
version, and available for any new edition, but that 
the variations were not sufficient to warrant immediate 
publication. 

There were suppliants who pleaded not for themselves 
but for parents or benefactors, and it is sad to find that the 
Convention, at times so much given to sentimentality, 
turned a deaf ear to them. But a public body, owing to 
the diminution of the sense of individual responsibility, can 
show heartlessness of which its members separately could 
scarcely be capable. Thus on the 5th November 1793 

1 Moniteur, xix. 250, 554 ; Gazette des Notcveaux Tribunaux. 



104 PARIS IN 1789-94 

one of the three little children of Madeleine Franeoise 
Kolly appeared, doubtless escorted by a friend, to plead for 
her mother's life, her father having been previously 
executed ; but the Convention declined to grant a respite. 
She was the second female victim of the guillotine. 1 It 
is true that the Convention thereupon ordered measures 
to be taken to provide an institution for children thus 
rendered orphans, but nothing seems to have come 
of it. 

The abbe Fenelon, prior of St. Cernin, collateral de- 
scendant, I believe, of the ancient prelate, had interested 
himself prior to the Revolution in Savoyard chimney-sweeps. 
He had protected them against tyrannical masters, had 
presented them with clothes, and given them religious and 
moral instruction. When he was incarcerated at the 
Luxembourg, the sweeps, on the 19th January 1794, waited 
on the Convention to plead for his liberation. They were 
ready to be bail for him, and even to be imprisoned in his 
stead, for they regarded him as a father. In any case they 
begged for a speedy report on his case. The petition was 
referred to the General Security Committee, by whom the 
arrest had been made. 2 It did not save Fenelon's life, 
possibly it hastened his trial and execution, for silence 
was safer than intercession. On the 19th July 1794 
he perished with the Luxembourg monster batch — a 
man of eighty charged with conspiring to break out of 
prison and massacre the Convention ! The three carts 
sent at eight in the morning to the Luxembourg to take 
the prisoners to the Conciergerie had been on the point 
of starting when the number was discovered to be one 
short. Fenelon had been forgotten, but was at once sum- 
moned. It was perhaps in expiation for his execution, 
as well as from admiration for Bishop Fenelon's works, 
that pensions were afterwards granted to the prelate's 
grand-nieces. 

Among the Robespierrists condemned with Fouquier 
Tinville on the 6th May 1795 was Etienne Foucault, ex- judge 

1 See p. 402. 2 Moniteur, xix. 250. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 105 

of the Revolutionary Tribunal. He had six children, one 
of whom, a boy ten years of age, was present, and learnt 
from a gendarme that his father was sentenced to death. 
Uttering piercing shrieks he hurried out of the court. Next 
morning he repaired to the Convention just as the sitting 
had commenced. Presenting himself at the bar he ex- 
claimed, " My poor father ! " and handed in a letter to the 
secretary, in which he begged for a respite. " My father," 
said the letter, "may have committed mistakes, but not 
crimes, and if he perishes his unfortunate wife will be 
reduced to poverty with her six children, mostly very 
young." President Vernier, endeavouring to console the 
boy, promised that the petition should be immediately sent 
to the Legislation Committee ; but a respite did not rest with 
that body, and Foucault was executed that very morning. 1 
It would certainly have been difficult to single him out 
for mercy because of his wife and children. Other ter- 
rorists might have urged the same plea. 

It is pleasanter to read of Gabriel Jean Fouinat, a boy 
of fourteen, who, on the 15th November 1794, waited on 
the Convention to announce his acquittal and to denounce 
his persecutors. His father having been arrested at 
Tonnerre by Maure, a member of the Convention, the boy 
wrote a letter to another member exposing Maure's misdeeds, 
but he dropped the letter on the road. It was picked up by 
an informer, whereupon the boy was apprehended, and im- 
prisoned for four months, his age, which would have 
entitled him to release, or to a milder punishment, being 
ignored. He was acquitted by the Revolutionary Tribunal. 
Maure, accused of other delinquencies, committed suicide 
in June 1795. Had Fouinat been tried before Thermidor 
he might, like two boys of the same age, Jean Fournier and 
Auguste Sainte Marie, have been sentenced to twenty years' 
imprisonment. 

But children did not always appear as suppliants. 
Probably the youngest child who waited on the revolu- 
tionary Legislatures was an orphan named Henry, four 

1 Moniteur, xxiv. 402, 403, 407. 



106 PARIS IN 1789-94 

years of age, who, on the 2nd December 1792, said, " My 
hands are still too young to bear arms. I beg you to 
accept a small offering. Unable to give my blood to 
the country, let me at least consecrate to it my small 
savings, which I have put together in two gold louis (48 
francs)." He asked the Convention to pass a law on adop- 
tion, for a friend wished to adopt him, and thousands 
of other unfortunates would benefit by such a law. The 
poor little boy must have been well drilled to learn 
this speech by heart. Then there is Euphrosyne de 
Vilaine, aged 8, who on the 29th April 1792, accompanied 
by her mother, presented herself to offer her contribution 
to the war. " Legislators," she said, " a child eight years 
of age comes to offer you her small savings for the 
soldiers of the country. This is the only service which 
her age and sex allow her at present to render ; but on 
growing up she promises, not arms or money to combat 
the country's enemies, but an example of civism and 
virtue." Euphrosyne was applauded, but does not seem 
to have been kissed by the president. Her unusual 
Christian name suggests that her mother, even before 
the Revolution, was, like Madame Roland, an admirer 
of classical antiquity. Again, on the 22nd May 1792, 
girls of Grenelle section presented 80 francs for the 
war. Their spokesman, for they had a male escort, 
stated that they regretted their inability to join the 
army on the frontier, but that they could, if necessary, 
handle the pike in defence of their homes, and that they 
were resolved to have no husbands who were not soldiers 
of liberty. 

On the 3rd July 1792 the collegians of Paris appeared 
at the bar to request that the money devoted to prizes 
should be given to soldiers' wives, while they would be 
content with oak wreaths. This was agreed to, with the 
proviso that a copy of the Constitution should accompany 
the wreath, and that the day after the distribution of 
the wreaths, the winners, together with their teachers, 
should be "admitted to the honours" of the sitting of 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 107 

the Assembly ; that is to say, should have seats, not in 
the gallery like the public, but on the floor. 

But these youthful orators did not invariably earn 
approval or admiration. On the 25th August 1793 a 
deputation of schoolmasters in favour of compulsory 
and gratuitous education was accompanied by some 
of their pupils. One of the latter delivered a speech 
in which he said that instead of boys being preached 
to in the name of a soi-disant Dieu they should be 
instructed in the principles of equality and the rights 
of man. The Convention, still nominally Catholic, had 
a thrill of indignation at the expression used by this 
boy spokesman, but doubtless put into his mouth by 
his master. 1 

The fair sex lost no time in. sharing in the right of 
deputations. On the 1st September 1789 twenty citoyennes, 
fourteen wives and six spinsters, presented themselves 
to offer their jewels to the country. They were greeted 
with plaudits, and La Luzerne, bishop of Langres, presi- 
dent, holding that French politeness forbade their being 
stationed at the bar, invited them to the foot of the 
tribune. An usher gave them his hand to help them 
down the steps, and chairs were arranged for them. 
They did not yet, however, venture on speechifying. 
Their mouthpiece, appropriately named Bouche, deputy 
for Aix, read for them an address in which they invoked 
the precedent of Roman matrons whose offerings enabled 
Camillus to fulfil his vow to Apollo in the capture of 
Veii, and they invited the Assembly to open a subscrip- 
tion of jewels and money towards meeting the deficit. 
The President warmly complimented them. "You will 
be more adorned," he said, " by your virtues and priva- 
tions than by the jewels which you have just sacrificed to 
the country." The example thus set was followed on the 
nth by a second group of ladies who modestly refrained 
from appearing, but sent in their jewels, while Bouche 
offered on behalf of two young ladies diamonds, bracelets, 

1 Moniteur, xvii. 492. 



108 PARIS IN 1789-94 

an emerald set in a "heart," and a louis d'or. Again, 
on the 16th, Mile. Lucile Arthur, nine years of age, pre- 
sented a gold thimble, a gold chain, and two louis. The 
ball thus set rolling acquired increased momentum, and 
patriotic contributions, in money and in kind, in which 
all classes participated, continued to flow in. 

These gifts, indeed, would well deserve fuller notice. 
Children sent their pocket-money, women their orna- 
ments and silver thimbles, men their decorations or 
the renunciation of their pensions. A cook sent 112 francs 
from her savings. A provincial laundress in March 1793 
sent four shirts and four pairs of stockings for the 
army. A French hairdresser at Tunis forwarded 450 
francs. A small proportion of the gifts may be attributed 
to ostentation or to fear of persecution, but the great 
bulk were evidently prompted by patriotism, especially 
as some were anonymous. In one case, indeed, political 
prisoners made a collection and sent the amount anony- 
mously. The gifts slackened after Thermidor, and gradu- 
ally ceased. 

On the 8th April 1794 a young gunner named Gechter, 
who in battle had lost both hands and the lower part of 
the left arm, appeared before the Convention under singular 
circumstances. A public functionary had seen him near 
the Temple of Reason, ci-devant St. Roch, wearing a coat 
with red epaulettes. Pitying this victim of war, he had 
anonymously sent 5000 francs to the Convention to be 
given to the maimed soldier, of whose name or address 
he was ignorant. The gift having been recorded in 
the newspapers, Gechter, accompanied by an officer, 
presented himself to claim it. He stated that his father 
was a poor sans-culotte locksmith, and that the money 
would be very acceptable. President Amar invited him 
to mount up to his chair, extolled his bravery and patri- 
otism, and handed over (if such a term can be applied 
in this case) the money. We may presume that the 
anonymous donor beheld the scene with tearful eyes 
from the gallery. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 109 

The extraction of saltpetre for gunpowder gave rise to 
some picturesque or grotesque deputations. On the 19th 
December 1793 citizens were invited to scrape the floors 
of their cellars, stables, and sheds in order to collect 
the saltpetre which they might contain, and on the 3rd 
February 1794 the result was seen in a procession of 
Paris sectionists, some bearing large copper vessels full 
of saltpetre, and others spades and picks for digging in 
search of it. A military band played at their head, and 
on their entry the hall echoed with plaudits. One of the 
spokesmen denounced the Georges and the Bourbons, 
the Pitts and Coburgs, who had too long debased man- 
kind. Another exclaimed " Saltpetre ! saltpetre ! salt- 
petre ! arms, and millions of soldiers until the heads 
of tyrants fall under the sword of the justice of peoples." 
President Vadier welcomed these "new Spartans," pre- 
dicting that the burning lava of French artillery would 
soon devour proud Albion and that the "infamous Pitt" 
would be flung into the sea. The " Marseillaise " and the 
" Carmagnole " would be sung within the walls of London, 
and French sans-culottes would rest after their voyage on 
the woolsack at Westminster. 

Again, on the 18th February, saucepans, spades, and 
picks, borne by men who sang as they entered, excited 
the enthusiasm of the Convention. Fifteen quintals of 
saltpetre, extracted by two thousand volunteers from 
Parisian cellars, were presented with the usual outpouring 
of oratory. 

One of these saltpetre deputations included Madame 
Berryer, wife of a barrister and mother of the famous 
Legitimist orator. The execution of Louis XVI. had 
given her such a shock that for three months before 
her confinement (the infant did not live) and for six 
months after it, she was in a very critical condition. Yet 
to avoid suspicion of royalism she had to agree to head 
a procession of her section (Beaubourg) with a presenta- 
tion of saltpetre. Bunches of holly from her garden were 
coated with saltpetre so as to glitter like diamonds, and 



no PARIS IN 1789-94 

wearing a bouquet of these, she had to speechify and 
to be kissed by the President. At that very time she was 
giving refuge to a proscribed marquis, who ultimately 
effected his escape from France. Madame Berryer had 
also to subscribe to and attend outdoor "fraternal 
dinners." x 

The Jacobins not only abolished monsieur and madame } 
substituting citoyen and citoyenne, but adopted, like the 
Quakers, the second person singular. From the 24th 
September 1792 the Moniteur, in its reports of the Con- 
vention, dispensed with all titles. " Robespierre said " — 
so and so. 2 Madame Robert, the daughter of Keralio, 
had in December 1790 advocated the use of tu, and this 
was universally employed in the Convention up to the end 
of 1794, so that when on the 9th Thermidor President 
Thuriot denied Robespierre a hearing, it was by exclaim- 
ing, " Tu n'as pas la parole'' It is evident, however, that 
outside the Convention and the clubs vous held its ground, 
for on the 30th November 1793 a deputation from various 
clubs asked that tu should be made compulsory. Vous, 
they urged, was ungrammatical and aristocratic. They 
obtained, however, nothing more than "honourable 
mention," one member of the Convention suggesting that 
vous was a fit shibboleth for aristocrats. Eleven days 
afterwards Bigard, indeed, proposed a decree on the 
subject, but Thuriot objected that the people were not 
ripe for it, and the motion was rejected. 3 As late, how- 
ever, as the 15th August 1798, the Paris authorities pro- 
hibited the use of monsieur and madame in plays not 
manifestly depicting pre-republican times, 4 while Gomaire 
advocated the prohibition of monsieur and even of sieur in 
bills of exchange. 

Several negro deputations waited on the Assemblies. 

1 Berryer, Souvenirs. 

2 In 1848-49 the official report of the Assembly dubbed every speaker citoyen. 

3 Moniteur, xviii. 314, 402. 

4 Even as late as July 1798 there was an order for expunging these terms from 
all plays, no matter to what period they referred. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES in 

On the 30th March 1792 eight negroes resident in 
France presented themselves to thank the Assembly for its 
fraternal intentions, and to assure it of their readiness to 
assist in the pacification of the colonies. On the 15th 
July 1793, Bellay, a negro, Mills, a mulatto, and Dufay, a 
white, all delegates from Martinique, were kissed by the 
President of the Convention, which next day decreed 
the abolition of slavery. Again, on the 20th March 
1794, citoyens et citoyennes de couleur presented a flag 
inscribed with the record of the decree of emancipa- 
tion. They wished this to be sent to the troops in the 
West Indies. Citoyenne Dubois asked permission, more- 
over, to sing some verses on emancipation, and this was 
granted her. 

The Convention was so unlike any other Legislature, 
before or since, that it is scarcely surprising to find it not 
only harangued by deputations but thus sung to by them, 
nor was this a solitary instance. On the 5th July 1793 
Valliere and two other actors sang the " Marseillaise," another 
patriotic song, and some verses glorifying the " Mountain " 
— that is, the Jacobins. The Convention ordered these two 
original compositions to be printed and sent to the de- 
partments. 1 Again, on the 31st October 1793, a deputation 
from Ris presented the spoils of the shrine of its patron 
saint Blaise, whose statue had given place to that of 
Brutus, and Ris being the name of a marquis they asked 
that the village might be called Brutus. They concluded 
by singing a patriotic hymn, and their request was granted. 
But Danton disliked these masquerades. When, on the 
15th January 1794, a group of youths invited the Conven- 
tion to a festival to be given by the Piques section, one of 
them singing patriotic verses composed by himself, Danton 
objected to the proposed insertion of the verses in the 
official report, that report being intended for laws in good 
prose, and the Education Committee should examine the 
verses. Dubouchet urged that patriotic songs had an 
electrifying effect in the sections and clubs, and should 

1 Moniteur, xix. 217. 



ii2 PARIS IN 1789-94 

be encouraged, but Danton rejoined that he had been 
unable to catch the sense of these verses, and could not 
therefore judge of their merits. 2 The song was accord- 
ingly referred to the committee, and of course nothing 
more was heard of it. Again, on the 16th March 1794, 
a spokesman of Grange Bateliere section, after reading 
a petition, began singing some verses of his own com- 
position, but Danton stopped him, insisting that the 
Convention should not be turned into a concert-room 
and that henceforth prose alone should be allowed 
at the bar. This was at once agreed to, and no more 
singing was heard till the 27th July 1795, when blind 
asylum children sang Joseph Chenier's verses on the fall 
of Robespierre. The Convention thenceforth was con- 
fined to prose, but on the trial of Babeuf and his 
fellow-anarchists at Vendome in March 1797, Sophie 
Lapierre struck up a hymn, and the other prisoners joined 
until silenced. 2 

Among the most singular, if not most memorable, 
scenes of the Convention were the abjuration of priests 
and the procession of the Goddess of Liberty. 3 On the 7th 
November 1793 Momoro, Chaumette, and other members 
of the Paris municipality escorted Gobel, constitutional 
bishop of Paris, and his vicars-general, who all renounced 
their clerical status. Gobel delivered a short speech, in 
which he declared that liberty and equality ought hence- 
forth to be the only religion, that he and his companions 
consequently handed in their letters of ordination, and 
that he hoped this example would consolidate the reign 
of liberty and equality. " Vive la Re"publique !" he ex- 
claimed, and deputies and spectators lustily repeated the 
cry. Gobel then advanced and laid on the altar of the 
country his clerical credentials, while vicar-general Denoux 
deposited three royal medals. President Charlier com- 
plimented them on their abjuration of error and their 
adoption of the religion of social and moral virtues, the 

1 Moniteur, xvii. 54. 2 Ibid, xxviii. 628. 

3 Not Goddess of Reason, as commonly stated. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 113 

only worship pleasing to the Supreme Being. By sacri- 
ficing the Gothic rags of superstition they had shown 
themselves worthy of the republic. Several deputies 
urged the President to embrace the Bishop of Paris. 
"There is no longer," replied Charlier, "a bishop, but 
a creature of reason, and I am going to embrace him." 
Thereupon Gobel, a cap of liberty on his head, was led 
up to the chair by Chaumette, and received the fraternal 
kiss. Four members of the Convention, Coupe, bishop 
Lindet, Jullien of Toulouse, a Protestant pastor, and bishop 
Gay- Vernon, next followed suit by renouncing their clerical 
status, and two spectators imitated their example. Later 
in the sitting a fifth deputy, bishop Lalande, also gave 
up his cross and ring, but bishop Gr^goire, very cour- 
ageously, if he was not, as some think, secretly encouraged 
by Robespierre, refused to abjure. Gobel was eventually 
guillotined, but the five clerical deputies passed unscathed 
through the Terror, and remained laymen for the rest of 
their lives. 1 

Two days afterwards, Chabot, an ex-Franciscan who 
had married an ex-nun, explained that he had long ago 
burnt his certificate of ordination. On the 10th November 
those deputies who were not in the secret were surprised 
by the entrance of a band of musicians, followed by girls 
in white, with tricolour girdles and garlands of flowers 
on their heads. Next came — I quote the official minutes — 
"a woman, the faithful image of beauty." She wore the 

1 One of their lay colleagues, Du Bignon of Ille-et-Vilaine, apparently felt it 
necessary to join in the demonstration, and he accordingly handed in the follow- 
ing letter: "Stupid and deceitful priests have outraged nature and man in me. 
They have sullied me by ceremonies of a baptism which, for my children and 
myself, I renounce. I renounce also all the acts of their stupid teaching. I have 
issued from the hands of the Creator of all things. I acknowledge the sublimity 
of nature and of His work. I proscribe the impostures of that infamous priest of 
Rome who ought some day to lay his head on the scaffold, a punishment too mild 
for that ferocious monster who, in concert with kings, has caused all the mis- 
fortunes of mankind. I return to nature. I admit no other religion than that of 
liberty and equality. I will erect altars to the republic only. Greetings and 
fraternity." (C. 285.) Du Bignon translated the Odes of Horace into French 
verse. It would be curious to know whether, like some of his colleagues, he 
readopted monarchy and religion. 

H 



ii4 PARIS IN 1789-94 

cap of liberty, a blue mantle was thrown over her shoulders, 
and in her right hand was a pike. The chair in which she 
was carried by four citizens was decked with oak leaves. 
" Her imposing and graceful attitude commanded respect 
and love." Deputies and spectators waved their hats at 
the sight, and shouted Vive la Republique. The Goddess 
was placed above the bar, in front of the president. 
Chaumette then informed the Convention that the pro- 
cession came from Notre Dame, now the Temple of 
Reason, where "we have not offered sacrifice to vain 
images, inanimate idols. No, it is a masterpiece of Nature 
whom we have chosen to represent her, and this sacred 
image has inflamed all hearts. . . . The people have said 
1 No more priests, no more Gods, except those whom 
Nature offers us/ " President Laloi expressed the readi- 
ness of the Convention to join in so memorable a festival. 
A deputy proposed that the representative of Liberty 
should be placed alongside the president, and Chaumette 
accordingly led her up the dais, when the president, as 
also the secretaries, gave her the fraternal kiss amidst 
loud acclamations. Laloi is described as one-eyed and 
ugly, so that it was a case of Beauty and the Beast. The 
goddess sat beside him for a moment till the Convention 
resolved to accompany the procession back to Notre 
Dame. There a piece called Offrande de la Liberie, 
which since the autumn of 1762 had had thirty or forty 
representations at the Opera, was performed. The original 
idea of the municipality had been to erect a statue of 
Liberty on the pedestal formerly occupied by one of 
the Virgin, but on second thoughts a living representative 
was preferred. The selection among the Opera ballet- 
dancers — for as Liberty had not to sing, but simply to 
pose, a singer was not necessary — must have depended 
on physical qualifications. Liberty seated herself on a 
pedestal or dais, and the girls in white paid her homage. 
As played at the Opera the " Marseillaise " was sung, but 
at Notre Dame this was superseded by a composition 
by Gossec, set to words by Joseph Chdnier — his brother, 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 115 

the Chenier, was not yet in prison — which had been sung 
before the Convention on the previous day. 1 

More public renunciations of priests followed, and 
the abolition of Catholic worship in Paris and other 
places naturally led to the confiscation of vestments and 
ornaments. On the 12th November Gravilliers section 
sent a troop of men decked in sacerdotal vestments and 
with crosses and banners. But for their being headed 
by a band which struck up a lively tune, they might have 
been taken for priests, but on reaching the bar of the 
Convention they threw off their vestments and proved 
to be national guards. Vive la liberie', vive la Republique ! 
they shouted as they threw off their disguise, and stoles, 
chasubles, and dalmatics were flung into the air. A young 
boy, "whose ears had never heard falsehood, and who 
had learned nothing but the Declaration of Rights," then 
read a short speech. Carried up to the president amid 
transports of enthusiasm, he was duly kissed, while the 
band played patriotic airs. Two priests accompanying 
the procession then deposited their certificates of ordi- 
nation. 2 Earlier in the sitting the Luxembourg and Croix 
Rouge sections had handed in costly reliquaries and an 
array of communion plate and vestments from St. Paul 
and St. Sulpice, heaped up on twelve litters. 

Next day deputations presented themselves from Vieux 
Corbeil, Chantilly, and other towns. "We come," they 
said, "to offer the Convention the impressive spectacle 
of regenerate men who, no longer believing in sacerdotal 
juggleries, have shattered the worm-eaten idols of super- 
stition. We bring with us their former priests, who abjure 
the mummeries of which they were the instruments. The 

1 See the Revolution Franfaise for April 1899, which corrects misstatements 
as to the title " Goddess of Reason " and as to the real nature of the performance. 
It should, however, be remarked that in some of the sections women representing 
Reason were paraded through the streets. Collot d'Herbois, at the Jacobin 
club on the 14th May 1794, denounced these processions, stating that "Reason" 
was so lightly clad that the unfastening of a single pin would have turned her into 
Debauch, and that the ceremonies ended in drunken orgies. 

2 Moniteur, xviii. 420. 



n6 PARIS IN 1789-94 

emblems and decorations of the Roman liturgy serve as 
patriotic disguises. Persons of all ages and both sexes 
had amused themselves by donning these mystic rags in 
order contemptuously to throw them off at the foot of 
the president's desk. They also offered precious metals 
which had adorned their churches in order to impose 
on the simple, but which would be far better employed 
in overturning tyrants." "The Convention," adds the 
minutes, "received with enthusiasm these trophies of 
philosophy and reason." 1 We need not credit Mercier's 
assertion that the deputations danced the Carmagnole, 
and that several deputies danced with girls in priestly 
vestments, for he was then in prison, and could only write 
from hearsay or imagination. 

On the 20th November Quatre Nations section sent a 
procession of gunners clad in priestly vestments, with a 
troop of women in white with tricolour sashes, and a 
crowd of men attired in all the costly robes of St. Germain's 
church. Litters loaded with church plate brought up the 
rear. After singing and dancing, Dubois, the spokesman, 
described the event as the downfall of eighteen centuries 
of superstition and fanaticism, and as the introduction of 
an era of peace and fraternity. " We swear," he said, " to 
have no religion but reason, liberty, equality, and the 
republic." "We swear it," shouted the sham priests, 
monks, and nuns who had seated themselves on one side 
of the hall. A little boy then solicited a presidential kiss, 
which he might pass on to his schoolfellows, who, he 
promised, would when older imitate their elders and 
become the terror of tyrants should any by that time 
survive. The boy forbore taking up the time of the 
Convention by reciting the Declaration of Rights, but he 
requested the preparation of a republican catechism, which 
he was anxious also to learn by heart. Not only was the 
kiss accorded, but a letter was ordered to be sent to the 
boy's parents, to congratulate them on his excellent 

1 This was the signal for a multitude of provincial parishes to send their church 
plate to the Convention, to be melted down and sold. 



DEPUTATIONS TO THE ASSEMBLIES 117 

training. The Butte des Moulins section next furnished 
a similar spectacle, the church plate of St. Roch being 
paraded in large baskets, and speeches and singing exciting 
great enthusiasm. 1 

To append anything to these scenes would be an anti- 
climax. The curtain may fitly fall on the heartlessness 
and effusiveness, the generosity and ferocity, the pathos 
and masquerade, of the revolutionary Assemblies. 

1 Moniteur, xviii. 479-80. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PARIS COMMUNE 

Records — Elections — Expulsions — Spectators — Deputations — Adoptions 
— Civic Baptisms — Re-naming of Persons and Streets — Suppliants 
— Bye-laws — Victualling — The Maximum — Civic Lent — Pet Animals 
— Butchers and Bakers — Requisitions — Iconoclasm — Abjurations of 
Priests and Nuns — Treatment of Royal Family — Simon and the 
Dauphin — Guillotine Crowds — Cemeteries — Weddings — Fate of the 
Commune. 

Because the Convention sat in Paris we are apt to imagine 
that it possessed the chief authority in that city, and that 
its discussions present the chief interest. It was certainly 
the sole source of legislation, the sole arbiter of inter- 
national relations, and the two governing committees, 
named after the bodies formed by American States during 
the struggle for independence, the Public Safety and 
General Security Committees (Salut Public and Surete" 
GeneYale), were its delegates. But the Paris Commune 
or municipality was a rival, and on some critical occasions 
a superior authority, coercing the Convention, and in 
Thermidor endeavouring to supersede it. Yet the pro- 
ceedings of this body have received little notice from 
historians, who are too much inclined to judge of the 
importance of events by the space devoted to them in the 
Moniteur. Now that paper gives undoubtedly the best 
reports of the Convention, it has been made easily ac- 
cessible by a modern reprint, and it is the only news- 
paper of the time which has been completely indexed. 
But it is little more than a French Hansard or Congressional 
Record. It contains, indeed, a brief epitome of foreign 
news and occasional notices of the Commune or of the 
Jacobin club, but it is mainly a parliamentary report. 
Other newspapers, moreover, though furnishing less 

118 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 119 

copious reports of the Convention, nevertheless give these 
the principal place, and are almost if not quite as meagre 
in their notices of the Commune. 

The minutes of that body, lodged of course at the 
hotel de Ville, were destroyed with that building in 1871. 
Mortimer Ternaux had made some slight use of them, in 
his Histoire de la Terreur, and Taine would doubtless 
have made still greater use had his researches commenced 
before that date. This destruction is an irretrievable loss, 
but the Commune from the 12th June 1793 to the 7th 
March 1794 issued a daily broadside recording such of 
its deliberations as presented most interest. We can 
imagine how eagerly this placard, printed on very ordi- 
nary yellowish paper, was perused, inspiring terror in some 
and exultation in others. The scanty reports in the 
Moniteur and other newspapers were obviously extracted 
or summarised from the broadsides. We must regret 
that they were discontinued after the fall of Chaumette 
and Hebert, four months prior to that of Robespierre. 
There is also at the Paris National Library a collection 
of the notices, decrees, and proclamations of the Commune 
from August 1792 to February 1794. Strange to say, these 
two records, Affiches de la Commune and the collection of 
notices, have been overlooked by most historians. 

It is necessary, before utilising these sources of in- 
formation, to explain how and when the Commune was 
formed. It is needless to go back to the municipality of 
1789, full printed minutes of which exist. Suffice it to say 
that though in fifteen months it had three priests — Fauchet, 
Bertolet, and Mulot — among its presidents, though it 
officially attended church in celebration of several re- 
volutionary events, and though on the 15th January 1790 
it ordered the prosecution of Marat for calumny, it showed 
in the germ that tendency to claim equality with the 
National Assembly which was subsequently so disastrous. 
It had every temptation, indeed, to such encroachments. 
Provincial deputations waited upon it as well as upon the 
Assembly, and there was also a profusion of oath-taking, 



i2o PARIS IN 1789-94 

and exchange of compliments. It was moreover, like the 
Assembly, the recipient of a multitude of denunciations, 
which were carefully investigated and not unfrequently 
dismissed as unfounded. Just, too, as the Assembly, while 
in the throes of bringing forth a national constitution, 
was perpetually interrupted by deputations, offering con- 
gratulations or preferring grievances, so the Commune was 
similarly interrupted in the preparation of a municipal 
constitution to be submitted to the Assembly. It was 
often, moreover, solicited to use its good offices with the 
latter body. It was inundated with reports of all kinds 
from the forty-eight " districts," which preceded the sixty 
" sections," and it had sometimes to check those districts 
for abuse of power. In short, the Commune of 1789, with 
Bailly as mayor and with presidents periodically elected, 
was to the Commune of 1792 very much what the 
Assembly of 1789 was to the Convention. It represented 
the Revolution at its rose-water stage. 

In December 1791 fresh elections were held, under the 
scheme passed by the National Assembly. The election 
was " by two degrees," that is to say, the sections chose 
delegates, and the latter then met and nominated the 
municipality. But already quiet men were beginning to 
hold aloof from politics. Out of 81,000 "primary" electors 
only 17,000 went to the poll, and so again when the 
delegates met, only 200 out of 946 attended. When Potion 
was chosen mayor there was a still further falling off at 
the poll. Out of the 81,000 electors only 10,632 voted, 
6728 of these carrying his election. In like manner 
Manuel was appointed procureur by 3770 votes, and out 
of 110,000 National Guards Hanriot, the future leader of 
the Thermidor rising, was on the 2nd July 1793 elected 
commandant by 9084 votes, his competitors mustering 
altogether 6095. 

It is needless to describe the organisation of the in- 
surrectionary Commune of the 10th August 1792 and the 
Provisional Commune of the 2nd December 1792. At 
elections of three municipal officers during that period 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 121 

only 14,000, 10,000, and 7000 citizens polled. Paris munici- 
pal history, indeed, from 1791 to 1794 is a series of violations 
of the franchise, or of its exercise by a small minority. 
Let us pass on to the Jacobin Commune of the 19th August 
1793, which lasted till the fall of Robespierre. No bye-elec- 
tions were held, for the Public Safety Committee claimed 
the right both of expelling and of filling up vacancies, and 
during the eleven months of the existence of that Com- 
mune twenty members were expelled and six others guillo- 
tined, while in Thermidor ninety-six were guillotined. 
The Almanack National of 1794 shows the composition 
of the Commune. Pache was mayor, succeeding Cham- 
bord in February 1793 by virtue of his 11,881 votes out of 
160,000 electors, but he was a mere figure-head. Lubin, 
the son of a butcher, as vice-president, generally acted in 
his absence, and in May 1794 he was superseded by 
Fleuriot-Lescot. Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, " procureur- 
syndic " or "agent national," was the ruling spirit — 
"Anaxagoras" Chaumette, as the ex-sailor and stump- 
orator had dubbed himself. 1 R6al, afterwards created a 
count by Napoleon, and Hebert, editor of the scurrilous 
Pere Duchesne, were his deputies. There were 144 members, 
three elected by each section. Forty-eight of these, one 
from each section, were styled municipal officers, or ad- 
ministrators of the six departments — victualling, police, 
finance, public institutions (schools, hospitals, pawnshops, 
&c), public works, and national or confiscated property. 
They formed the " bureau municipal." The remaining 
ninety-six were called "notables," and formed the "corps 
municipal," while the entire 144 composed the "General 
Council of the Commune." The bulk of them were 

1 The National Archives (T. 1611) contain an inventory of his papers together 
with a small book, leaves stitched together probably by his wife, full of entries in 
a neat, close handwriting of such proceedings of the Commune from the ioth 
October to the 3rd December 1794 as relate to priests of religion. There is also 
a vellum-covered book recording all his own public acts from his admission into 
the Cordeliers club in Sept. 1790 to his election as procureur. It ends thus 
boastfully : ' ' Acclamations of the people, frantic joy on their part ; I am loaded 
with benedictions and plaudits. Louis Capet, Louis Capet, I defy thee to have 
enjoyed when thou wast king as many of these as I." 



122 PARIS IN 1789-94 

tradesmen of all kinds — jewellers, perfumers, tailors, grocers, 
cabinetmakers, builders, masons, mercers, confectioners, 
painters, shoemakers, &c. There seem to have been no 
butchers or bakers, trades which the dearth of provisions 
subjected to strict supervision and rendered very un- 
popular. A few were retired tradesmen. There were also 
several lawyers, doctors, teachers, engravers, an architect, a 
sculptor, two engineers, two men of letters (Baudrais and 
Pierre Louis Paris, an Oratorian monk), and three ex- 
priests, Roux, Claude Bernard, and Pierre Bernard, all 
of whom had violent deaths. 

The Commune itself, as well as the Public Safety Com- 
mittee, exercised the right of expulsion. Antoine Gency, a 
cooper, was expelled on the 24th March 1794 on the charge 
of indecent conduct towards the female prisoners at the 
Salpetriere and the English Benedictine convent. The 
chief charge, however, was a conversation in a wine-shop, 
where he had exclaimed against the Revolutionary Tribunal 
for acquitting nine Nancy prisoners whom he had been the 
means of arresting. He said that five of them ought to 
have been condemned, and that had there been a day's 
delay he should have adduced conclusive evidence. It was 
also alleged that he got served sooner and in larger 
quantities than ordinary customers at shops. Tried on the 
7th May, he was, however, acquitted, and nine days after- 
wards was readmitted to the Commune, which shows that 
his seat had not meanwhile been filled up. He was 
executed in July as a Robespierrist. 

The Commune, like the Convention, had its spectators, 
who were at times so uproarious that on the 24th March 
1794 the galleries were asked to elect, at the opening of 
each sitting, two " censors " to keep order. A woman, 
moreover, a regular attendant, complained of her pocket 
being picked. She even asked the Commune to make 
good the loss, but it declined to set so questionable a 
precedent. Deputations also, as with the Convention, 
took up, if not much of its time, at least much of the space 
of its minutes, and delegates from the sections attended to 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 123 

offer suggestions. Thus the Place Vendome section on 
the 6th November 1793 invited the members to wear red 
caps, and this being at once agreed to, the deputation 
eagerly presented their own caps to the mayor and pro- 
cureur, who donned them amid loud plaudits. Next day 
it was resolved that all the members should be " capped " 
at the" public expense. When, however, ten days later a 
female deputation appeared with the same headgear, 
Chaumette sharply rebuked them. His objurgations had 
such an effect that the women instantly doffed the caps, 
substituting ordinary women's caps, which they must have 
had in reserve in their pockets. Chaumette had fixed ideas 
on the subjection of women, and missed no opportunity of 
calling them to order. On the 29th August 1793 fishwives, 
at his instance, were forbidden to force bouquets on people 
in the streets, or to push their way into houses on the plea 
of saluting newly elected functionaries, levying blackmail 
for such compliments. On the 29th October, moreover, 
the Commune sent delegates to the women's club to 
reprimand an attempt to enforce on market-women the 
wearing of the red cap. Compulsion in such matters was 
prohibited, and the club was reminded that a woman who 
kept at home to prepare her husband's meals, "mind" the 
children, and tidy the house, was acting as a good patriot 
equally with the clubbist. 

We hear of the Cordeliers club offering the heart of 
Marat, but it was told that Marat belonged to the entire 
nation, and that the Commune had no right to dispose of 
a hair of his head. His heart was, however, buried under 
a tree in the club garden, "the true Pantheon," said 
Chaumette, "of the man of nature," and the rue des 
Cordeliers, where he had lived, became the rue Marat, 
the section likewise taking his name. When the Gravilliers 
section, on the 22nd June 1794, addressed a report to the 
Commune, styling it an "honourable" body, there were 
murmurs, and Payan (Chaumette's successor) denounced 
a term "disgraced by employment in the English House 
of Commons." A girl four years old, adopted by a printer, 



124 PARIS IN 1789-94 

offered to recite the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but 
in view of want of time, and of the recitation having been 
already made to the section, civic mention and a fraternal 
(an obvious misprint for paternal) kiss from the president 
were thought sufficient. The president, moreover, in a 
previous case had said that it would be better for a child 
to be taught sewing than recitations. The mother, " whose 
youth, elegance, and beauty struck all beholders," replied 
that the child had shown a taste for reciting verses ; but 
Chaumette bluntly suggested that knitting stockings for the 
soldiers would be more useful. Leonard Bourdon, how- 
ever, escorted to the Commune orphans of martyrs of the 
Revolution adopted by him, and one of them recited the 
Declaration. The Commune ordered that they should be 
furnished with red caps, as a constant reminder of the 
tyranny to which their fathers had fallen victims. Nor was 
this the only recitation with which the Commune was 
regaled. A type-founder's son, aged eight, gave the Com- 
mune the choice of hearing the Rights of Man, the 
Constitution, or a song on the martyrs of Liberty. On 
their choosing the Rights of Man, he recited the Declara- 
tion without the slightest stumbling, and with an unction 
beyond his years. Thereupon it was resolved that a tablet 
in the hall should record the names of scholars distin- 
guished by proficiency in republican doctrine, so as to 
excite emulation. The Bibliotheque section having, more- 
over, decided on presenting a tricolour ribbon to the 
girl, and a sabre to the boy, who had best recited the 
Declaration, it escorted them to the Commune, and 
invited the president to give them a paternal kiss ; after 
which the boy, amid plaudits, said he should use the sabre 
solely in defence of the republic, and he ended by shout- 
ing Vive la Republique ! But while precocity was thus 
encouraged, the Commune refused, on the 25th January 
1794, to sanction boys' clubs, on the ground that a school- 
master would have to be present, and that it would thus 
be a school, not a club. The hopes of the boys of Beau- 
bourg section were thus blighted. Singing was not wholly 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 125 

confined to children. On the 6th July 1793 the spokesman 
of the Invalides section, after announcing its acceptance of 
the Constitution, sang some patriotic verses to the tune 
of the " Marseillaise." The enthusiastic spectators joined in 
the chorus, and the Commune ordered 5000 copies to be 
sent to the Eure and Calvados departments, as precursors 
of the troops to be despatched against the Girondins. 

To do good by stealth was not then the fashion, or at 
least was not universal. We have seen how Leonard 
Bourdon paraded his orphans. In like manner a priest, 
at whose door a child four years old had been left, in- 
formed the Commune that he had adopted the poor 
foundling. The Commune requested the Education Com- 
mittee to record the fact in the annals of civism. On the 
3rd January 1794 Perou, of Butte des Moulins section, 
announced his adoption of one of the four illegitimate 
and deserted children of a woman named Bernard, then in 
England. " My wife," he said, " will fulfil the sacred duties 
of mother, while both of us will bring him up in republi- 
can principles." Childless, he had previously adopted two 
boys, but one, not taken young enough, had turned out ill, 
and the other had died. Several other persons presented 
themselves to announce their adoption of children, usually 
orphans or destitute. Some of these benefactors were 
childless married couples. Adoption, however, might 
conceal nefarious purposes, for on the 3rd January 1794 
it was ordered that such applications should be subjected 
to inquiry. Considering the number of orphans made 
by the guillotine, it is melancholy to find but one record 
of such an adoption — the sixth child of an unfortunate 
victim ; but let us hope that there were other cases which 
were not trumpeted. Chaumette, on the 12th June 1793, 
presented a negro boy, bought as a slave in America, whom 
he intended to start in life as a compositor, "the trade," 
said Chaumette, " of Franklin." The Commune, at his re- 
quest, named the boy Oge or Oger, after the quadroon who 
came to France from St. Domingo at the beginning of the 
Revolution, returned in 1790, but heading an insurrection, 



126 PARIS IN 1789-94 

was captured and executed. " Thou art free," the presi- 
dent harangued the boy, " thou art a human being, mind 
and become a republican." 

This was a kind of lay baptism, and infants were some- 
times taken to the Commune to receive that rite. At an 
earlier stage of the Revolution priests, indeed, had not 
apparently objected to the bestowal of Roman names, for 
on the 27th March 1792 a child was baptized at St. Germain 
de Pres as Brutus ; but with lay baptism eccentric nomen- 
clature went great lengths. Thus, on the 19th October 
1793 a man presented to the Commune a child whom he 
had named Revolutionnaire. Another infant, originally 
named Reine, was introduced on the 6th November and 
re-named Fraternite. Some of the members exclaimed 
" Bonne nouvelle," whereupon it was suggested that these 
two words should form a second name. Hermann, the 
judge by whom Marie Antoinette was tried, named his 
infant Aristides. After the fall of the Jacobins men who 
had named their sons Marat or Robespierre naturally 
desired to re-name them, and in the Council of Elders on 
the 3rd June 1797 Dochez proposed to facilitate this, but 
Savary urged the difficulty of drawing up a list of pro- 
scribed names, and nothing was done till 1803, when a 
law was passed enabling such names to be discarded and 
prohibiting such appellations for the future. 

Adults, too, changed Christian or surnames. Louise 
Loulan, abhorring the saintly and monarchical associations 
of Louise, took on the 22nd October the name of Portia ; 
and a godson of Louis XV., named after him Louis, soli- 
cited, a week later, permission to style himself Mutius 
Scaevola. A child born on the 10th August 1792, the day 
of the invasion of the Tuileries, was named Victoire Egalite. 
The Commune, on the 15th September 1792, invited by the 
Duke of Orleans to give him a name, fixed on Egalite, 
and under that name he sat in the Convention and was 
tried and executed. His sister, the Duchesse de Bourbon, 
in the same spirit styled herself Citoyenne Verity. In like 
manner Nicolas Joseph Paris, afterwards registrar to the 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 127 

Revolutionary Tribunal, was authorised on the 5th February 
1793 to change his surname to Fabricius, because deputy 
Lepelletier had been murdered by a man named Paris. So, 
too, Bourbon, appointed secretary to the Commune, took 
the name of Fleury, 1 not apparently reflecting that this sug- 
gested the name of a cardinal ; while another Bourbon was 
authorised on the 4th February 1794 to assume the maternal 
name of Tarin. A woman announced that her son, unable 
to endure the opprobrium of the surname Leroy, because 
of its resemblance to le rot, had assumed the name of Unite. 
A bricklayer named Leroy styled himself Lesapeur, because 
he had been the first in pulling down an old royal palace. 
Fancy all the people named King going before the London 
Common Council during the Commonwealth to be re- 
named ! 2 Baptismal names, indeed, could be altered without 
any formality, and Chaumette, as we have seen, had dubbed 
himself Anaxagoras in lieu of Pierre Gaspard, while Victor 
Hugo's father assumed the name of Brutus ; but change of 
surname called for official sanction. An ex-priest named 
Erasmus styled himself Apostate. It is not surprising to 
find, however, that these applications wasted much time, 
so that at the instance of Chaumette the business was 
turned over to the sections. 3 Girondin names became 
eventually as odious as royalist or religious ones. A man 
named Brissot on the 5th November 1793 styled himself 
Franciade Libre, Franciade being the new name of the 
suburb St. Denis. But perhaps the strangest application of 
all was that of Barracaud, a member of the Commune of 
the 10th August 1792, who on the nth November appeared 
with his wife and children, asking to be unbaptized and 

1 Moniteur, xx. 459. 

2 Murat, the future king of Naples, styled himself for a time Marat, and Lucien 
Bonaparte, the future prince of Canino, became Brutus Bonaparte. These freaks 
were denounced at the Jacobin club in Oct. 1793 by Dubois-Crance, who remarks 
that men should try to render their names illustrious, instead of assuming and 
dishonouring those which were already so. 

3 Couturier reported from Etampes, in Nov. 1793, that the numerous names 
of Roi, Reine, Louis, and Antoinette had disappeared. As a general rule he had 
ordered Louis to be superseded by Sincere, Roi by Libre, Reine by Julie, and 
Antoinette by Sophie. (C. 283.) 



128 PARIS IN 1789-94 

re-married in republican fashion under the name of Chalier, 
after the deputy who died in prison at Lyons. We do not 
hear what Christian (?) name he took, but his wife became 
Atride and his two sons Aristides and Regulus. This 
Barracaud, of the Arsenal section, in March 1794 denounced 
Sylvain Marchal's play, Le Congres des Rois, because it 
represented the " infamous Cagliostro " as a patriot and 
republican, and depicted the " immortal Marat " in a magic 
lantern. The disuse of the observance of name (or patron 
saint) days to be substituted by birthdays was advocated as 
a logical corollary. 

The re-naming of streets, 1 practised on so large a scale, 
though generally ordered by the sections, occasionally de- 
volved on the Commune. On the 4th November 1793 the 
Place Venddme section submitted a proposal for calling the 
rue St. Honore" rue de la Convention, and for naming its 
other streets after Lycurgus and other heroes ; but the Com- 
mune objected to such a monopoly of historical names by a 
single section. The word " saint," however, was eliminated 
from Parisian topography, and on the nth November 1793, 
just after the installation in Notre Dame of the Goddess of 
Liberty, the adjacent square and bridge took the name of 
Reason. In a corner house of the rue St. Dominique there 
is still the blank left by the word Saint having been effaced. 
The navy underwent the same process, all names associated 
with royalty being superseded. So also with playing-cards. 
The king was at one time styled " Pouvoir Executif," and 
on royalty being abolished the king and queen took other 
names. 2 Guyton Morveau, in November 1793, proposed 
to republicanise chess in the same fashion, roi, reine, tour, 
fou, and chevalier to become enseigne, adjutant, canon, dragon, 
and cavalier, while pawns were to be called infantry. 3 

Some of the applications to the Commune had a more 
practical purpose than mere changes of name. Thus a 
woman having twelve sons in the army asked, on the 23rd 
December 1793, for a passport to go and see her grand- 
children. She not only received the passport, but amid 

1 See p. 34. 2 See p. 47. 3 Moniteur, xviii. 383. 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 129 

the acclamations of the assembly a kiss of gratitude from 
the president. An Englishwoman who had lived twenty- 
six years in France, had married a Frenchman, and was the 
mother of two children, one of them serving in the army, 
protested on the 4th November 1793 against being arrested 
as a foreigner, and an inquiry into her case was ordered. 
The daughter of Palloy, the stonemason who had made 
such a profit by selling fragments or facsimiles of the 
Bastille, complained on the 18th January 1794 that in spite 
of all his services to the Revolution her father had been 
thrown into prison ; but her solicitation was unavailing, for 
he was charged with appropriating part of the proceeds of 
the sale of the old materials of the fortress. 

It must not be supposed that the Commune was un- 
mindful of the duties of ediles. It exhorted citizens going 
into the fields to pluck wild flowers to keep to the borders 
and not trample on the corn. It required house-owners to 
provide pipes so as to prevent rain from streaming or 
dropping from the eaves on pedestrians ; but on recon- 
sideration, iron and lead being urgently required for the 
army, this regulation, on the 28th December 1793, was 
rescinded. Waggoners were forbidden to ride, and required 
to walk alongside their horses ; but it seems uncertain 
whether the object was to protect pedestrians from being 
run over in streets, still and for long afterwards devoid of 
foot-pavements, or to prevent men unprovided with civic 
cards from galloping off on being challenged to produce 
them. These cards were rigidly insisted upon in the case 
of all male adults, and latterly in that of females also. 1 
Parisians had white and strangers red cards, 80,000 of the 
former and 20,000 of the latter being printed in readiness 
for use on the 27th March 1793. No houses or lodg- 
ings were to be let to persons unprovided with them. 
After eleven at night patrols, on the 21st September 1793, 
were directed to demand their production from everybody 

1 In Dec. 1793, however, the Commune, touched at seeing the difficulty with 
which an ex-priest and his housekeeper mounted the platform, resolved that 
persons over seventy years of age should not be required to apply for cards in 

I 



130 PARIS IN 1789-94 

whom they met, and they were provided with lanterns, 
that the cards might be scrutinised. On D6cadis the hour 
was ultimately altered to midnight. Outside every house, 
moreover, the name, age, and vocation of every inmate 
had to be inscribed in such a position as to be easily read. 
The refusal or postponement of these cards to persons 
suspected of royalism or lukewarmness was very harassing, 
and this naturally led to underhand means of procuring 
them. A man named Lebas, who had invited municipal 
officers to dinner with this object, was on the 7th April 
1794 prosecuted for attempted bribery. The officers had 
declined the invitation and had denounced him. 

That the interests of morality were not overlooked is 

person. Sedaine, the dramatist, if he had to renew his certificate, may have 
benefited by this concession. Here is his original certificate : — 

REPUBLIQUE FRANCHISE 

Carte de Surete 



N° 1 19 Folio 5 e 

De la I2 e Compagnie 



COMMUNE DE PARIS 



Le citoyen Michel-Jean Sedaine, 

Natif de Paris, 

Departement de Paris, 

Age de soixante et quatorze ans, 

Demeurant, Cour cy-devant du Louvre, 

Residant a Paris depuis sa naissance. 

Section de Musaeum 

Signalement : 

Cheveux et sourcils blancs. 
Front haut et ouvert. 
Nez droit, yeux bleus verddtres. 
Bouche moyenne, menton rond. 
Visage ovale. 
Signature : Sous lieutenant p. 

J. Sedaine. le capitaine : 

Le 21 mars 1793. Niodot. 

Vilmorin, Roger, 

President. Secretaire. 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 131 

shown by the general orders daily issued by Hanriot. 
Thus, on the nth Florial, he denounces indecent drawings 
chalked or pencilled on the walls of guardhouses, "which 
make modesty blush," and the printsellers on the quays 
were ordered not to exhibit improper pictures. On the 
12th he speaks of women wearing green or white ribbons 
in lieu of tricolour, and of men placing the cockade in the 
lining of their hats so as to conceal it. On the 17th he 
forbids young men to bathe near the bridges — " Modesty 
is required ; a republic is the aegis of virtue." Two days 
later he forbids bathing except in the bathing pontoons. 
On the 22nd, a gendarme having brutally knocked down an 
old cripple, he exclaims, "Woe to the man who does not 
respect old age," and the delinquent was punished. De- 
crees were more than once issued against loose women. 
Conjurors, as well as rosary vendors, were forbidden to 
ply their trade in the streets, and private lotteries were 
prohibited. For a time unmarried men were excluded 
from municipal offices, but this disability, on the 10th June 
1794, was removed as having the undesigned effect of pre- 
venting young men from marrying, for want of a good 
position. Of crime we hear little, and Payan, in a glowing 
account of the festival of the Supreme Being, stated that 
not a flower was plucked by the crowd in the Tuileries 
gardens, though no soldier, as formerly, protected them. 

The use of the birch at the Foundling Asylum being 
reported, all institutions and schools, on the 1st October 
1793, were strictly forbidden to resort to so humiliating and 
indecent a punishment, or to any form of corporal chastise- 
ment. While shops were forbidden to close on Sunday, 
but had the option of closing or opening on Decadi, provi- 
sion shops, on the 20th January 1794, were required to open 
on the latter day. On the 18th March 1794 the closing of 
butchers' shops on ci-devant Vendredi Saint was complained 
of. Good Friday, by the way, is still the only day in the 
year when French butchers close. 

The Commune took care, a week after the September 

1 See Journal de la Montagne. 



132 PARIS IN 1789-94 

massacres, that the families of the victims should be pro- 
tected from inconvenience or litigation. It required the 
keepers of all the prisons where massacres had been com- 
mitted to repair to their respective sections and give in- 
formation respecting the "martyrs" (it is surprising to 
meet with this term), lest families should have difficulty in 
obtaining legal proof of death. The clothes and other 
effects of the victims were also to be deposited at the 
section, so that they might be claimed by their families. 

The victualling of Paris, as we shall see more fully later 
on, was one of the most difficult duties of the Commune. 
The Convention had imagined that fluctuations in prices 
occasioned by the depreciation of paper money could be 
checked by the "maximum" law. 1 Paine, in May 1793, 
had vainly warned Danton, from his American experience, 
of the folly of such a measure. 2 On the 29th September 
1793 the Convention fixed the price throughout France of 
bread, meat, fuel, candles, tobacco, and drinks, and a few 
days later eatables of all kinds were also dealt with. It 
devolved on the municipalities to enforce this system, and 
the Paris municipality, moreover, undertook to guarantee 
the supply of bread and meat, but only in limited quantities, 
the inhabitants in fact being on rations as in a besieged 
city. Shambles were established at the Hotel Dieu (hospital), 
but the hospital doctors remonstrated against this proximity 
as deleterious for the patients, and another site was pro- 
bably found. 

Such had been the scarcity of meat that in April 1793 
Vergniaud proposed a " civic Lent," viz., the prohibition of 

1 So called because it fixed the "maximum," but really the only, price. 
Absurd as it seems to us for the State to regulate prices, it should be remembered 
that the assize of bread, not repealed in England till 1824, had long existed also 
in France. Diocletian in 310, on account of advancing prices, especially in the 
frontier provinces where the armies had to purchase supplies, fixed the price of 
provisions and wages. His preamble might have served for the Convention, for 
it said, " Everybody knows by experience that the commodities sold daily in town 
markets have reached exorbitant prices, and that the inordinate passion for gain 
is no longer checked either by importations or by abundant harvests, but regards 
the very bounties of Heaven as an evil." 

2 Conway's "Writings of Paine," iii. 127. 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 133 

veal. This was referred by the Convention to a committee, 
but nothing had come of it when two months later Thuriot 
advocated abstinence from meat during the month of 
August, so that cattle might grow and multiply. There- 
upon Marais and Montmartre sections resolved on a six 
weeks' civic Lent, while Prud'homme proposed the abolition 
oipain btnit in churches, as also of hair-powder. The former 
measure, he calculated, would save France thirty million 
pounds of bread per annum. Santerre, the brewer, in 
February 1793 had placarded Paris with a proposal to get 
rid of dogs and cats, as bouches inutiles whose food would 
nourish 1500 men ; but Jeauffre threw ridicule on this 
scheme by ironically advocating the destruction of 
10,400,000 sparrows, whereby 100,000 men could be fed 
for seventy days. Santerre, however, claimed credit for 
philanthropy, alleging that there were silly women who 
each kept sixty cats and as many dogs. A caricature re- 
presented him as waited upon by a deputation of cats and 
dogs, whose intended remonstrances he silenced by draw- 
ing a small guillotine from his pocket. The club of 
Chatillon-sur-Seine also petitioned the Convention, on the 
14th November 1793, for the slaughter of all dogs, whose 
provender, it urged, would feed 100,000 human beings. 
In May 1794 the Commune recommended citizens not to 
keep dogs, except such as were necessary for business, and 
these should be kept indoors or chained to carts. Dogs 
loose in the streets at night were to be killed. 

Bad harvests were the original cause of the dearth of 
bread, and the municipality contracted for wheat from 
England and America, but the evil was aggravated by 
vexations of all kinds inflicted on the peasants. Market 
carts, too, were sometimes pillaged by the mob, and 
neighbouring towns competed with Paris for supplies. In 
lieu of being, as prior to the Revolution, a source of 
revenue, Paris was a heavy drain on the State, requir- 
ing a monthly subsidy of 546,000 francs (in assignats) 
for bread alone, so that it might be sold under cost 
price. 



134 PARIS IN 1789-94 

For fear of supplies running short, people collected 
outside bakeries by eight at night, though the shops did not 
open till five or six next morning, and the crush caused 
several accidents. A commissary of the section, however, 
was present to maintain order. A woman named Richard, 
who, tired of standing, had sat down on the curb-stone for 
a moment, wanted to regain her place, and being ordered 
by the commissary to go to the bottom of the row, she 
called him nigaud (simpleton). For this she was arrested, 
as also a bystander who had taken her part, but after two 
months the Observatory section pleaded for her release 
as not having known that the man was a commissary, and 
as having been sufficiently punished for her inadvertence. 
She and her champion were accordingly liberated. Bakers' 
shops, by a decree of the 10th May 1794, were doubled in 
number to prevent this crowding, and people were for- 
bidden to collect outside them overnight or before 6 a.m. 
Numbered tickets were eventually issued at night for use 
next morning, for we hear of a complaint of persons 
selling such tickets, which secured them priority in being 
served. Arcis section complained on the 7th April 1794 of 
rolls being made, but the reply was that these were of 
the same quality as ordinary loaves, and that uniform 
quality, not size, was sufficient. Beaubourg section alleged 
on the 22nd May that shopkeepers told customers they 
could sell only at a particular hour, which accounted 
for the daily gatherings called queues. This does not prove 
that the thing was new, as Carlyle imagines, but merely 
the name, for crowds had long been known outside theatres. 
An incidental remark in the defence of Hermann at his 
trial shows that the allowance of meat was three pounds 
per head for ten days. There were constant complaints 
of clandestine sales, and of violations of the maximum, as 
also of food being smuggled out of the city. Bakers and 
butchers were frequently called to account or arrested by 
the sections for selling bread to persons not resident in the 
particular section, or for sending it out beyond the 
barriers. Their journeymen had also to be forbidden to 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 135 

leave their masters without a month's notice, or to demand 
more than the fixed wages. 

Butchers were accused of palming off diseased meat, 
as also horse and dog flesh, and of selling off their best 
joints surreptitiously before opening their shops. Butlers 
and cooks whose masters had fled from France had started 
restaurants. These, it was complained, were well supplied 
with game and poultry. The Commune consequently 
ordered that meat of all kinds entering Paris should be 
taken exclusively to the markets, and never direct to 
the consumer. Butchers were also forbidden to send 
out meat to customers. Wealthy prisoners were accused 
of faring sumptuously while patriots were starving, and 
latterly they were restricted to the prison diet. 

The difficulties caused by the maximum were not con- 
fined to bakers and butchers. Grocers' shops, on account 
of the scarcity of sugar, were repeatedly the scenes of riot 
or pillage. Several chandlers gave up business rather than 
submit to the system, and cabmen refused to take fares 
at the fixed tariff. Happily a mild winter made spring 
vegetables early and plentiful in 1794, while a Brest convoy 
brought American wheat. 

Nor was food the only thing subject to regulation. 
Rags were requisitioned for assignats, and shoemakers had 
to supply the army, nolens volens, citizens being also in- 
vited to present their shoes to the troops, and as far 
as possible to wear sabots. Even musicians were liable 
to being drafted into regimental bands. Doctors were 
requisitioned for civil or military service, and even elderly 
men, exempt from the conscription, were enrolled for driv- 
ing military baggage carts. Parisians, of course, were not 
likely to be thus treated, unfamiliarity with horses dis- 
qualifying them, but they had to help in manufacturing 
saltpetre for gunpowder. 

One of the latest measures of the Commune — and 
the discontent thereby caused contributed to its fall — was 
the application of the maximum to wages. It issued 
a wages list, from which it is sufficient to quote the 



136 PARIS IN 1789-94 

journeymen bakers' tariff : for 9 or 10 batches a day, first 
man 15 francs, second 12 francs, third 9 francs ; for 5 or 6 
batches, 12 francs, 9 francs, and 6 francs; for 3 or 4 
batches, 10 francs, 8 francs, and 6 francs. 

The Parisians remained thus on rations till the 20th 
February 1796, when the Directory left them to feed 
themselves, with the exception of paupers. 1 The price 
of bread and meat, however, continued to be fixed 
every ten days, though other commodities had from the 
10th December 1794 been left to the law of supply 
and demand. 

We read in Hay ward's contemporary " Annals of Queen 
Elizabeth":— 

Not only images but rood-lofts, relics, sepulchres, books, paint- 
ings, copes, vestments, altar-cloths, were in divers places committed 
to the fire, and that with such shouting and applause of the vulgar 
sort as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city. So difficult 
it is when men run out of one extreme not to run into the other. 

This is just what happened in Paris in the autumn 
of 1793. Notice was sent on the 14th October to all 
ministers of religion, priests, rabbis, pastors, and Quakers 
— it is strange to hear of Quakers in this connection — 
that no rites or demonstrations would be permitted in 
the streets, and the closing of the churches soon followed. 
Plate and vestments were carried off, and section after 
section appeared before the Commune to offer the spoils. 
The coffer of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, 
which in August had been removed from the Pantheon 
to St. Etienne-du-Mont, was opened, and all its treasures 
sent to the Mint, the saint herself, as the Commune was 
sarcastically informed, " offering no opposition." Most 
of the precious stones, however, it was alleged, were false. 
The Commune, which had already resolved on sending 
its revolutionary decrees, translated into Italian, to the 
Pope "for his instruction," insultingly ordered the de- 
spatch to him of the minutes of this operation, 2 and the 

1 Moniteur, xxvii. 414-17-58. 3 Ibid, xviii. 489. 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 137 

saint's bones and shroud were directed to be burnt on the 
place de Greve, " to expiate the crime of having served to 
propagate error and encourage the luxury of the idle." 
Accordingly on the 3rd December the remains were 
destroyed, together with chasubles and copes. 1 Three 
weeks previously there had been a holocaust of the relics, 
missals, and vestments of ci-devant Notre Dame, and 
the reliquaries, sent to the Mint, were valued, independently 
of workmanship, at 248,976 francs. Quinze-Vingts section 
handed in to the Commune the alleged shirt of St. Louis, 
which, it was announced, had proved to be a woman's 
shift. It was at once committed to the flames. The 
Jews followed suit. Beauborg section was their especial 
quarter, and they presented a cope said to have belonged 
to Moses and to have been ever since worn by his suc- 
cessors, while citizen Benjamin assured the Commune 
on the 12th November that he and his brethren wished 
to be regarded not as sectaries but as Frenchmen. On 
the 23rd of that month all churches were closed. Be it 
remembered that it was the " constitutional " clergy who 
were thus silenced, for the recusants, still professing 
allegiance to Rome, had long been ousted or banished. 
An explanation, however, was given a few days afterwards 
that citizens were at liberty to hire buildings for worship 
and pay stipends to ministers. Robespierre had probably 
thrown out a hint that intolerance was being carried too 
far. But the better to extirpate religion, no almanacs 
except those of the new calendar were allowed to be 
sold, and when the Jewish passover arrived in 1794, the 
decree for one kind of bread being rigidly upheld, the 
Jews were forbidden to buy flour for unleavened bread. 
The abjuration of priests was the natural sequel to the 
renunciation of obnoxious names, and sometimes a man 
simultaneously abandoned his priesthood and his name. 

1 In 1804 the stone tomb, which contained the saint's remains before their 
being deposited in the reliquary, was found in the crypt of the Abbaye, and it was 
placed, together with relics of her from various other shrines, in St. Etienne, 
enclosed in an ornamental mausoleum. 



138 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Erasmus van de Steen, a Belgian cleric, became a layman 
as Apostate van de Steen, and Laurent Desland became in 
like manner Tell Desland, for William Tell vied in popu- 
larity with classical and more authenic personages. Joseph 
Francis Ovid Lemasson became Acale(?) Lemasson, to be 
the namesake, as he said, of the inventor of the mariner's 
compass ; while his wife — for he was married as well 
as unfrocked — superseded Francoise Marie Elisabeth by 
Aglae-Mariee. Aglae is of course one of the Graces ; turn- 
ing Marie into Marine was a kind of pun. Cournand, who 
claimed to have been the first priest to renounce his 
functions, and to have always combated superstition, was 
among the abjurors. Between the 14th September 1791 
and the 10th November 1793 his wife had borne him three 
children. "Nullus annus sine prole." An ex-nun, amid 
plaudits, took, on the 3rd October 1793, the oath of fidelity 
to the Republic, and the Commune directed the sections 
to keep a register of laicisations. On the 14th November 
several doctors, anxious to emulate the unfrocked priests, 
presented themselves to confess that they had been char- 
latans, and that nature and reason were the best remedies. 
They accordingly offered their diplomas, to be converted 
into cartridges. A barrister, named Calmet, not to be 
outdone, handed in his legal diplomas, for which, he said, 
ermined pundits had charged him much without teaching 
him anything. 

I have yet to speak of one, and that the most invi- 
dious, of the functions of the Commune — the custody of 
the royal family in the Temple — functions which were 
performed with inexcusable barbarity. The Commune 
claimed jurisdiction over all Paris prisons, and the Temple 
was therefore included. The Luxembourg, the Arch- 
bishop's palace, and the Ministry of Justice — advocated by 
Manuel and Petion — had been in turn proposed for the 
royal captives, but these were objected to as insecure, and 
on the 13th August 1792 the Commune suggested the tower 
of the Temple, to which the Constituent Assembly agreed. 
The Assembly undertook the cost of maintenance, and 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 139 

voted half a million francs on account for this purpose. 
The King asked for 2000 francs of this sum to be handed 
to himself as pocket-money for small expenses, but this 
was refused. The Queen, having left her watch behind 
her in her hurried escape from the Tuileries, ordered a 
repeater, with gold chain, of Br^guet, the founder of a 
business still carried on by his descendants on the quai de 
l'Horloge; the price was 960 francs. 1 Cl£ry, the King's 
faithful valet, made applications for necessaries, and in 
October 1792 cards, dominoes, draughts, and other games 
were purchased. In November the Queen procured 
several pieces of music. Among them, strange to say, 
was the " Marseillaise," and this she played to one of the 
municipal commissaries on the harpsichord, which had 
been tuned for her. What a subject for a picture, Marie 
Antoinette playing the "Marseillaise" to her jailors! As 
the prisoners, moreover, had recovered none of their 
clothes from the Tuileries, and had only those they 
were then wearing, the King ordered a supply. Those 
for himself cost 5163 francs, 2 those for the Queen 9904 
francs, those for the Dauphin 2036 francs, those for the 
daughter 3653 francs, and those for Princess Elisabeth, 
the King's sister, 4465 francs. Altogether sixty-five bills 
were incurred for clothes, making, with twelve others for 
sundry purchases, such as prayer-books, silk stockings, 
cosmetics, a gilt-blade pocket-knife for the Dauphin, and 
corsets, a total of 29,513 francs. The Commune, on the 
18th November, ordered the smaller bills to be paid at 
once, while the larger ones were to be examined. A 
report on the kitchen expenses from the 13th August to 
the 31st October shows that there were altogether thirteen 

1 The depreciation of paper money has always to be taken into consideration. 

2 His clothes, as though unfit to be worn by any one else, and even his 
bedding, were burnt by the Commune on the place de Greve on the 29th 
September 1793. They consisted of six coats, of various material — cloth, vel- 
veteen, silk, and calico — ten pairs of breeches, a satin shirt, five pantaloons, 
nineteen white waistcoats, two dressing-gowns, a hat, and a tortoiseshell snuff-box 
(broken). Even the tree of liberty planted by Louis in the Tuileries gardens at 
an early stage of the Revolution was uprooted on the first anniversary of his 
execution as " sullied by Capet's impure hand." 



140 PARIS IN 1789-94 

cooks and kitchen servants. The fare at the three meals, 
breakfast, dinner, and supper, was ample and varied. The 
King observed all the Church fasts, though his family did 
not ; but he alone took wine, and that in moderation, 
whereas they drank water. All, the reporting commissary 
acknowledged, were abstemious ; but Goret, another com- 
missary, states that until the King's trial their appetites 
were good. What was left was consumed by the thirteen 
cooks and the two waiters. The bills for the eleven weeks 
amounted to 28,745 francs. 1 On the 8th December the 
cooks were ordered to cater for the commissaries as well 
as for the prisoners. On the 14th December the female 
prisoners applied for winter clothes. 

It is satisfactory to find that the material necessities of 
the captives were, at least until the Queen's removal to the 
Conciergerie, unstintedly supplied ; but the moral tortures 
to which they were subjected were lamentable. Plots were 
undoubtedly formed for their release, and these were held 
to justify insulting rigours. Four commissaries were at first 
on duty, but in December the number was doubled. Some 
watched the King, others the Queen, the rest sat in the 
council-room, where they deliberated on the prisoners' 
requests, gave orders to the cooks, servants, and warders, 
and drew up reports to the Commune. Each commissary 
served forty-eight hours, and the duty was taken by the 
members of the Commune in rotation. On the 20th 
September the King was transferred from the main build- 
ing to the tower, and the other prisoners were afterwards 
placed in the story above him. The King was deprived of 
all writing materials and knives, a ridiculous and insulting 
precaution against suicide, but on the other hand the four 
warders were then withdrawn from his room. The two 
warders of the lower story had 6000 francs a year each, on 
account of the importance and danger of their functions. 
Three hundred National Guards, receiving five or six 

1 Journal de Paris, Nov. 20 and Dec. n, 1792; Nouvelle Revue, April 1, 
1884, article by Morimerie, who, in 1848, found on a bookstall a bundle of manu- 
scripts respecting the prisoners in the Temple. 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 141 

francs a day, were posted outside the Temple, and remained 
there even after the King and Queen had been guillotined. 
One of these was arrested on the 20th March 1794 for 
taking a plan of the tower. 

Some of the commissariespublished after the Restoration 
their reminiscences of the Temple, and these have lately 
been reprinted by M. Lenotre, 1 but being manifestly de- 
signed to obtain Court favour they must be received 
with caution. Goret, an ex-inspector of markets, states 
that he was told to keep his hat on, and to style the King 
"Monsieur Capet." The hat instruction seems to be 
corroborated by the fact that on the 21st July 1793 the 
Cordeliers club denounced a commissary as taking off his 
hat to the prisoners, the reply given being that such a want 
of self-respect was impossible. Lepitre, a schoolmaster, 
relates that his colleague Mercereau, a stonemason, 
stretched himself out on the sofa usually occupied by the 
Queen, and that Lechenard, a tailor, got intoxicated while 
on duty. Some commissaries drew their chairs to the fire, 
and put their feet on the fender, so that the prisoners could 
not approach it. Two unfrocked priests, Roux and Bernard, 
who eventually escorted the King to the scaffold, were 
on the rota. One of them indulged in such foul language 
that one evening at supper the three female captives, who 
had only just sat down to table, were obliged to leave the 
room. The other sang songs all night to prevent their 
sleeping. 2 The warders were even ruder than the com- 
missaries, threatening the prisoners with death, singing 
obscene or revolutionary songs, and covering the walls of 
the corridors with caricatures of the King at the gallows. 

The Convention, it is but fair to say, desired the captives 
to be properly cared for, and it twice sent members chosen 
from the General Security Committee, to ask them whether 

1 Captivitt et Mort de Marie Antoinette. 

2 Roux committed suicide on the loth Feb. 1794 to avoid trial by the 
Revolutionary Tribunal, to which the ordinary tribunal had relegated him when 
charged with embezzling charity subscriptions and inciting the pillage of grocers' 
shops. Bernard, according to Lepitre, died of a painful disease, but Wallon 
names him among the Robespierrists who were guillotined. 



142 PARIS IN 1789-94 

they had anything to complain of. It is revolting, how- 
ever, to find that one of those delegates was Drouet, the 
postmaster by whom the royal family were arrested at 
Varennes in June 1791. 1 On the 1st November 1793 he 
reported that the prisoners had nothing to complain of as 
to food and accommodation, but they wished a sum to be 
fixed for their maintenance, so that they might not exceed 
it. They also wished for a doctor and apothecary acquainted 
with their constitutions. Dr. Le Monnier was accordingly 
sent, and when the King was ill, Princess Elisabeth also 
having a bad cold, a daily bulletin was issued. The King 
likewise asked for 2000 francs for small daily expenses and 
for furniture and linen from the Garde Meuble. On the 
16th November Drouet, after conferring with the Com- 
mune, again went to the Temple, where the King repeated 
the same requests. 

After the King's death, the Public Safety Committee was 
guilty of wanton barbarity, on the 1st July 1793, in order- 
ing the poor little Dauphin, eight years of age, to be 
separated from his mother, sister, and aunt. Municipal 
commissaries had to execute this order, and after an 
hour's heartrending struggle, in which they " showed 
her as much forbearance as was possible," the Queen 
submitted. The appointment of a guardian for the 
Dauphin rested with the Commune, and it selected the 
infamous shoemaker Antoine Simon. He entered on his 
functions on the 3rd July, at a salary of 500 francs a month. 
His wife accompanied him to the Temple. She had 
formerly been a domestic servant, and enjoyed small 
annuities from two of her old mistresses. She was his 
second wife, having married him in 1788, and had no 
children. She had tended in August 1792 some of the 
men wounded in the attack on the Tuileries, who had been 
conveyed to the Cordeliers' church, near which she lived, 
and on applying for payment for her services had been 
awarded 200 francs. Simon was charged never to let the 
Dauphin go out of his sight. His treatment of the 

1 See p. 503. 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 143 

unfortunate boy is one of the most harrowing chapters in 
history. 1 Happily on the 20th January 1794 he had to 
choose between his wardership and his seat on the Com- 
mune, and he chose the latter. The commissaries thence- 
forth had charge of the child. Retribution awaited Simon, 
for he sided, as a member of the Commune, with Robes- 
pierre, and perished with him. He lived in the street 
named after Marat, and was doubtless a worshipper of that 
sanguinary fanatic. On the 20th June 1795 his confiscated 
papers were restored to his widow. They showed that he 
had four shares of 90 francs each in Lafarge's tontine, one 
in his own name, another in his wife's (Marie Jeanne 
Aladame), a third in his brother's, and a fourth in his 
wife's sister's. 2 His widow survived till the Restoration, 
when she contrived to obtain a pension from the royal 
family on the representation that she had been kind to the 
Dauphin, though there is no evidence that she ever 
attempted to check her husband's brutalities. She died in 
an hospital on the 10th June 1819. 

Some of the commissaries, especially after the King's 
execution, pitied the captives, though demonstrations of 
such pity were highly dangerous. On the 20th April 1794, 
five commissaries, a lawyer, a schoolmaster, an architect, 
a bookseller, and a builder, were denounced by Tison, 
ex-valet-de-chambre to the Queen at the Temple, for 
having betrayed sympathy. They were consequently 
struck off the rota. Tison had been dismissed on the 
12th December 1793, it being thought useless to go on 
giving him 6000 francs a year when Marie Antoinette 
had been sent to the Conciergerie. Some of the members, 
indeed, wished to retain him as a means of obtaining 
information respecting Princess Elisabeth, but others 
deemed it unlikely that she would make a confidant of 
him. Suspected of " moderantism," he was imprisoned 
in the Temple from the 22nd September 1793 till January 
1795. His wife, it is said, from remorse, went mad in 
June 1793, but was discharged from the asylum in 

1 See Beauchesne, Louis XVII. a T. 1 666. 



144 PARIS IN 1789-94 

February 1795. These five members were fortunate in 
not incurring expulsion from the Commune. A sixth, 
Lebeuf, a teacher, was denounced on the 5th September 

1793 by Simon, as having reprimanded him for bringing 
up the little Dauphin like a sans-culotte. Lebeuf explained 
that he had merely objected to the poor child being taught 
indecent songs, and had spoken in the interest of morality. 
The Commune ordered him, nevertheless, to be interro- 
gated by the police, and on the 8th October 1793 he 
and four other councillors were arrested. They were 
tried on the 20th, but acquitted. A sixth, however, was 
arrested at Bordeaux and guillotined. On the 27th March 

1794 Cressond was not only struck off the rota, but 
expelled from the Commune and prosecuted for having 
expressed pity for the Dauphin's fate under Simon. After 
a fortnight's imprisonment he was released, on the ground 
that though weak-minded and no revolutionist, there was 
nothing serious against him. 

We get occasional glimpses from the commissaries' 
reports of the three prisoners remaining after the Queen's 
removal on the 2nd August 1793 to the Conciergerie. It 
should be mentioned that two months before that event 
the Commune, at her request, allowed Gil Bias to be 
procured for the Dauphin, who was also supplied with 
a collection of toys, but that in July the dietary had 
been reduced, the expense apparently now falling on the 
Commune. In September the commissaries seized some 
embroidery on which Princess Elisabeth and her niece 
were working, because the border contained small crosses. 
The Commune, however, declared this unworthy of 
notice. 1 Elisabeth's gold thimble being worn into a 
hole at the end, so that she could no longer use it, 
she gave it up to the commissary, who induced the 
Commune to order that it should be sold for the benefit 
of the poor and that she should have a copper or ivory 
one. Alas ! the unfortunate seamstress had only two 
months' use of the new thimble. A daily potion supplied 

3 Esprit des Gazettes. 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 145 

by a druggist was countermanded on the ground that 
both the Princess and her niece were in good health. We 
hear of a tradesman who supplied the Temple being called 
to account for overcharge. 

The Commune fell with Robespierre, and Barras claims 
credit as having on the very day of its fall visited 
the royal captives, scolded the Dauphin's keepers for 
the slovenly condition of his cell, and induced the 
Public Safety Committee to order proper medical at- 
tendance. The Committee appointed two warders, and 
everything was done to save the life of the poor Dauphin, 
but he expired on the nth March 1795, in the arms 
of commissary Lasne, according to Lasne's epitaph in 
Pere Lachaise. In the Temple quarter, however, there 
was a rumour that the funeral was a sham, and that 
the poor boy had been smuggled away. Here we have 
the germ of the sham Dauphin legends. After his death 
the Committee, on the 13th June 1795, directed the 
commissaries of police to select three women of "moral 
and republican virtue," one of whom it would appoint 
as his sister's companion. The commissaries were also 
to report on her food and on what clothes she re- 
quired. Thenceforth, until her release in December 
1795, Therese was becomingly treated. Married in exile 
to her cousin the due d'Angouleme, she re-entered France 
in 1814, was again an exile in 1830, and survived till 
1848. 

The guillotine is seldom mentioned in the Commune 
minutes, for it was not directly in the jurisdiction of 
that body ; but on the 16th August 1793 its attention 
was called to the insecurity of the scaffolding put up 
in the place de la Revolution (now Concorde) for spec- 
tators at the execution of General Custine. A citizen, 
moreover, represented that to treat executions as a 
show was unworthy of French humanity. The matter 
was at first referred to the police, but on a second 
representation being made of the danger of accidents, 
the Commune ordered the stands to be removed. None 

K 



146 PARIS IN 1789-94 

were thenceforth to be erected in any public square 
without the consent and supervision of the authorities. 
But this prohibition could not have been enforced, for 
on the 24th March Thermes section reported several 
accidents from the fall of stands at the execution of 
Hebert and his associates. There was also a complaint 
that carts (evidently filled with spectators) blocked up 
the highway near the guillotine. The order against stands 
or other obstructions was consequently renewed. Spec- 
tators were likewise forbidden to wave their hats or 
walking-sticks when the axe fell. This mention of walk- 
ing-sticks implies the attendance of men above the 
working class. But what had Thermes section to do 
with the place de la Revolution, unless, indeed, some 
of its inhabitants had suffered in the accidents ? On 
the 7th October Chaumette alleged that prisoners gorged 
themselves with drink before starting for execution, con- 
sequently appeared very courageous, and shouted Vive 
le Rot, so that the spectacle, instead of being deterrent, 
became triumphal. He urged that drink should be for- 
bidden. 

If the guillotine was not in the province of the Com- 
mune, cemeteries and funerals were so. Ordinary funerals, 
by decree of the 10th January 1794, had to take place 
at midnight. They numbered about fifty a day, whereas 
the guillotine latterly despatched nearly as many. A 
complaint of Chaumette on the 8th November 1793 
gives us a thrill of horror. He stated that the Madeleine 
gravediggers stripped the bodies of the guillotined inside 
the cemetery, and put up the clothes for sale on the 
spot among the bystanders. At his suggestion it was 
ordered that the bodies should be taken to a building, 
apparently the former chapel, and should be there stripped 
and immediately interred. The gravediggers might then 
be allowed to bargain among themselves for the clothes. 
To secure proper decorum, a commissary of the section 
was to be present. Chaumette had little idea that the guil- 
lotine within five months awaited him also. These ghastly 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 147 

perquisites were abolished ; and on the 9th 1 February the 
Commune decided that the bodies should be wrapped 
in packing cloth, while according to Michelet the clothes 
of the victims were latterly sent to the hospital. Female 
victims had their hair cut off, as we know, before execu- 
tion, in order that their necks might be bare. A speech 
by Payan in the Commune on the 10th May 1794 tells us 
what became of these locks. He ridiculed elderly women 
for purchasing them. " This," he said, " is a new species 
of masquerade, a new branch of trade, a new kind 
of devotion. Let us not interfere with these harmless 
pleasures. Let us respect these blonde wigs. Our aris- 
tocrats will serve at least some purpose. Their hair will 
conceal the bald heads of women, and the thin covering 
of others who were never Jacobins except by their hair." 

On the 6th February 1794 the Roule section asked for 
the closing of the Madeleine cemetery, in which the King 
and Queen had been buried. " The proverb morte la bete, 
mort le ve'nin," said the spokesman, " is falsified, for the 
aristocrats are poisoning us even after their death." An 
assurance was given that another spot should be selected, 
and accordingly on the 24th March the Hubert batch of 
victims " handselled " a small plot of ground at the corner 
of Pare Monceau and the rue du Rocher, part of the con- 
fiscated Orleans property. This served until the removal 
of the guillotine to the eastern extremity of Paris, the place 
du Trone, when Picpus served for the interments, but as 
Robespierre and his confederates were executed in the 
place de la Revolution, the Monceau plot was then again 
used. When the northern end of the rue Miromesnil was 
made, some of the bones of the victims were discovered. 
As late as 1896 a dingy one-story wine-shop at the corner 
of rue Monceau stood on part of the cemetery, but it is now 
all covered with lofty houses, in constructing the cellars 
of which every vestige of 1794 must have been destroyed. 

Weddings as well as funerals were in the province of 
the Commune. Civil marriage was decreed in June 1792, 
and all marriages were performed at the Hotel de Ville. 



148 PARIS IN 1789-94 

La Reveillere-Lepaux tells us that he once witnessed the 
ceremony, if ceremony it can be called : — 

I never in my life saw anything more indecorous. The entrance 
to the hall was crowded by a thousand roughs, whose disgusting 
talk and cynical gestures shocked even the least fastidious. Picture, 
next, a dirty undecorated hall, where people were packed pell-mell 
on tavern-like benches — bridegrooms, brides, and witnesses (I do 
not say parents, for the young couples, who were in the majority, 
had none), a public officer with untrimmed hair and shabby morning 
coat, a large ugly statue of Hymen, holding in his hand two old 
wreaths of discoloured artificial flowers ; a few clerks to keep the 
registers. All these persons on an old wooden platform. Picture 
the successive calling up of each couple, the utterance in four words 
of I know not what formula, the signing of the couples and witnesses 
at the foot of the register, and behold, twenty or thirty marriages 
finished ! No ceremonies, no speeches, no music, no emblems, no 
gathering of two families and their friends. 1 

Of the 144 members of the Commune ninety-six were 
executed as accomplices of Robespierre, and the metropolis 
was thus deprived of local self-government. Paris, or 
rather the small faction which ruled in its name, had 
sought to dictate to France. France now dictated to it in 
its turn. "This populace," Barbaroux had written, "is no 
more fit for a philosophical government than the lazzaroni 
of Naples or the cannibals of America {sic)." But let us not 
forget that Paris had been ruled by a turbulent and un- 
scrupulous minority. 

1 Riflexions stir le Culte, an 5. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PARIS SECTIONS 

Registers — Organisation — Nomenclature — Civic cards — Recitations — 
Prison " orgies " — Fraternal dinners — " Tu," not " vous " — Gifts — 
Revolutionary committees — Arrest of English — Other arrests — 
Suburban refuges — Petty tyranny — Suppliants — Delation — Twelfth 
day — Deaf and dumb — Morellet — Episodes — Scarcity — Iconoclasm 
Committees dissolved — Exposures and prosecutions — Amnesty — 
Stage satire. 

After the Commune we naturally come to the " sections." 
They played a prominent, sometimes indeed a decisive, 
part in the principal episodes of the Revolution ; yet very 
little is generally known of their nature and organisation. 
Some persons probably suppose them to have been sub- 
divisions of the Commune or municipality. Others imagine 
that they signify the inhabitants of particular areas or 
battalions of the National Guards. No accurate idea, 
however, can be formed of the government of Paris — a 
kind of Parish Council rule under which peaceable citizens 
were often at the mercy of fanatics or miscreants, exposed 
to domiciliary visits, arbitrary arrests, forced subscriptions 
to objects which they abhorred, and sometimes constrained 
to simulate approval of the worst excesses — without under- 
standing what these sections really were. If historians 
have taken but little notice of them it has not been from 
want of accessible materials. The National Archives of 
Paris possess fifty-six registers, 1 mostly bulky folios, con- 
taining the minutes of meetings of sections or their com- 
mittees. Mortimer Ternaux examined several of these for 
his Histoire de la Terreur, which he did not live to com- 
plete, while Taine seems to have looked only at two, the 
registers of sections Roi de Sicile and Beaubourg. A 

1 F. 7, 2471-2526. 

149 



150 PARIS IN 1789-94 

perusal of fifty-six volumes, some ill written, is indeed 
neither easy nor inviting. I do not profess to have 
made an exhaustive scrutiny of them, but the time I have 
devoted to them has been well repaid. Taine too hastily 
concluded that they were the work of illiterate secretaries, 
" the very language and spelling of the lowest stamp." In 
reality they are of very various quality. Some, such as 
Bibliotheque, are admirably kept, well written, well spelt, 
and, to crown all, well indexed. Others, Tuileries, 
Quatre Nations, Grenelle, Invalides, Gravilliers, for instance, 
are exactly the reverse, ill written, ill spelt, and unindexed. 
The majority, as might be expected, are neither very good 
nor very bad. They are mostly thick folios, but the Mont- 
martre register consists of sheets stitched together, with 
paper covers, those covers, curiously enough, consisting of 
church music or service notices which had evidently hung 
in some church for the use of the choir. It is indexed, but 
imperfectly. Cassini, the astronomer, was for a time 
secretary of Observatory section, though he was eventually 
imprisoned, and that register is usually well kept. Some 
registers have a title-page, an elaborate caligraphic flourish 
with republican symbols. The Pantheon committee 
utilised the old ledger of a Catholic college, apparently 
Lisieux, turning it round so as to begin at the first page, 
but leaving at the other end entries showing payments 
made by students in 1725-26. Among these I notice a 
Charles Macarthy and a Jean de la Place of Rouen, possibly 
a kinsman of the astronomer. The committee which thus 
spared the expense of stationery had an illiterate secretary. 
In some cases the secretary wrote a good hand, but was 
occasionally absent and had an illiterate substitute. Let 
us not forget however that fashionable ladies then some- 
times spelt phonetically. There is great difference also in 
quantity as well as in quality. In the Theatre Frangais and 
Halle-au-Ble registers we read day after day "affaires 
ordinaires." This ordinary business is just what we should 
like to know, though we can guess from other registers 
that it consisted of applications for civic cards, reception 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 151 

and investigation of denunciations, and orders of arrests. 
Many of the registers, indeed, are a monotonous chronicle 
of the granting of civic cards, apprehensions for incivic talk 
in caf£s or elsewhere, the placing or removing of warders 
at houses whose occupants were under arrest at home, 
and denunciations of sales by tradesmen at unlawful 
prices. 

Although half the registers of the revolutionary 
committees are missing, including the Luxembourg, which 
would have been especially interesting to us on account 
of the detention of Paine and other Englishmen in the 
palace of that name, it is not likely that they have been 
clandestinely destroyed, as undoubtedly has happened 
in the provinces, by persons anxious to conceal the 
fanaticism of their ancestors. These missing documents 
were not perhaps handed over to the new committees 
when, on the 20th October 1794, the sectional were 
superseded by arrondissement committees (an arron- 
dissement being a group of four sections) ; or, when 
these bodies in their turn disappeared, their papers 
may not have been deposited in the National Archives. 
In one case there is an index without any corresponding 
register. Those registers, however, which remain are 
amply sufficient to give us an idea of the operations of 
the sections. 

But we should first explain when and how these 
bodies were created. Paris, which before the Revolution 
had had sixteen quarters, was divided in 1789 into sixty 
districts, and these, though formed only for the purpose 
of electing the municipality or Commune, continued to 
exist as what may be called vestries or ward-motes, 
claiming authority over the inhabitants, and sometimes 
encroaching on the functions of the Commune. In 
June 1790, as part of a new organisation, the city was 
divided into forty-eight sections, of irregular shape and 
size, but so arranged as each to have about 12,000 in- 
habitants, 2000 of them "active" or householding, rate-pay- 
ing, and voting citizens. Besides electing three members 



152 PARIS IN 1789-94 

of the Commune, the section appointed committees 
— a charity {bienfaisance) committee, which attended to 
the relief of the poor, distributing food and fuel tickets, 
a civil committee, which secured the supply of food and 
transacted general business, a correspondence committee, 
and from the 21st March 1793 a surveillance or revolu- 
tionary committee, which granted or withheld certificates 
of " civism " (that is to say, of republicanism), made domi- 
ciliary visits to search for arms, and arrested suspects. 
Latterly there was also a saltpetre committee, for that 
commodity, as we have seen, was scarce, and was 
urgently required for the manufacture of gunpowder. 
Each section had its "armed force," or company of 
the National Guard, members of which by rotation 
had to mount guard at the headquarters of the section, 
at the barriers (if the section bordered on the walls), 
and in the principal thoroughfares. There were ap- 
parently two men at each watch. No substitute was 
ostensibly allowed unless a member of the same com- 
pany, and then subject to the permission of the superior 
officer, three absences otherwise entailing a week's im- 
prisonment. In point of fact, however, substitutes were 
common, about a hundred men in each company per- 
forming the whole duty, as proxies paid by the indolent 
or the unwilling, and Champcenetz, when condemned 
to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal, mockingly asked 
the judge whether he could not as in the National 
Guard procure a substitute. By a decree of September 9, 
1793, a general meeting of each section was held twice 
a week, on Sundays and Thursdays, which on the 
adoption of the new calendar was altered to twice a 
decade, viz. the fifth day of the month and every mul- 
tiple of five. The Thermidorians, I may here mention, 
took care not to choose one of these days for the 
attack on Robespierre, for it feared that these meetings 
might side with him. He fell, indeed, on the 10th 
Thermidor, but the conflict was on the 9th, and simply 
lasted till after midnight. At the instance of Danton, 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 153 

the Convention on the 4th September 1793 allowed 40 
sous or 2 francs out of the national exchequer for at- 
tendance at a general meeting, but this sum was to 
be given only to men who claimed it as necessary for 
their subsistence, and who were present when the pro- 
ceedings opened (in winter at 5 p.m.), a proof that the 
citizen had struck work early in order to attend. There 
was a complaint in Place Royale section, 16th May 1794, 
that those leaving early received the money. Gross frauds 
and personation, if we are to believe a speech in the 
Convention by Cambon on the 21st August 1794, 1 were 
practised in some of the sections. Payment was claimed 
for 1200 attendants when there had not really been 
more than 300, not all of whom had even applied for 
the 40 sous, and the money went, not to the necessitous, 
but to men in receipt of good salaries. No strangers 
were to be admitted, and the meeting was to close by 
10 P.M. Whether for pecuniary or political reasons, the 
Convention, on the 17th September 1793, dismissed with 
a reprimand an application for permission to hold more 
frequent meetings, and the Public Safety and General 
Security Committees prohibited the convening of special 
meetings. 2 The section committees, however, met as often 
as they chose, the revolutionary committee indeed daily, 
and the members of the latter were paid at first 3 francs 
but ultimately 5 francs a day, which was to be raised 
by a tax on the rich. These allowances, small as they 
were, especially when paper money became depreciated, 
were not to be despised when the exodus of the wealthy 
and the cessation of foreign visitors had thrown many 
Parisians out of employment, and when, as the natural 
effect of agitations, there was a disinclination for manual 
labour. 

The sections mostly met in churches or monastic 

1 Monileur, xxi. 556. 

2 But this was evaded by the creation of ' ' popular societies " or clubs, which 
could meet nightly and sometimes met at 10, at the normal close of the sectional 
meeting, of which it was really a continuation. 



154 PARIS IN 1789-94 

chapels, which, indeed, were the only buildings sufficiently 
spacious. Sergent Marceau 1 tells us that the municipal 
pew in front of the pulpit usually served for the president 
and secretaries, and that speeches were in some cases 
delivered from the pulpit. For a time the churches thus 
served both for worship and for political gatherings, but 
in the autumn of 1793 religious services were suppressed, 
the Commune, on the 13th November, notifying the 
Lombards and Thermes sections, which still tolerated 
them, that liberty must be the only object of worship. 
Busts of Marat, after his assassination, were placed in 
the sectional buildings, but were ignominiously shattered 
on the fall of the Jacobins. 

The sections were originally named after the principal 
object, fountain, square, or building included in their 
limits, though there had been an idea of making them 
commemorate celebrated men buried in their midst; 
but when streets were re-named in order to efface all 
religious and monarchical associations, the sections were 
subjected to the same process. Several of them, indeed, 
underwent repeated changes, if named after a celebrity 
of the day, for reputations were very short-lived. Many, 
if not most, of the appellations eventually ceased to 
convey any idea of their locality. Sans-Culottes, Homme 
Aime, Enfants Rouges, Amis de la Patrie, Bonnet Rouge, 
Indivisibility, Reg^neree, Contrat Social, Guillaume Tell, 
F£d6res, Marseille, Montagne, Republique, Reunion, 
Revolutionnaire, Unite, gave no clue to their topography, 
though Mirabeau and Marat sections indicated that those 
personages had been, so to speak, parishioners. The in- 
convenience of these names could not but be felt, and a 
suggestion was made that each section should be named 
after a tree of liberty of a particular kind planted in its 
midst, but this botanical nomenclature would not have 
mended matters. When names of streets were metamor- 
phosed, the section was in some cases the agent in this 
process, for as early as the 6th October 1792 Mirabeau 

1 Mrs. Simpson, "Reminiscences of a Regicide." 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 155 

(afterwards Mont Blanc) section turned Provence into 
Franklin, Taitbout into Brutus, St. George into Guillaume 
Tell, and Martyrs into Regulus. These classical appella- 
tions could have conveyed no meaning to the mass of 
the population, and the fashion in which they must have 
been distorted is shown by the public crier of Mutius 
Scaevola section being punished for calling it cervelas 
(saveloy). But it was not merely classical names which 
were unintelligible even to the partially educated. A 
petition in August 1798 to the Council of Five Hundred 
from Aillant (Champagne) advocated the amalgamation 
of certain holidays with the " Fetes de Cadaires." This 
term, written twice over, might have puzzled me but for 
an endorsement by the secretary of "the Council, who 
spelt it correctly " decadaires." Yet this petition was in 
good handwriting, probably that of the parish school- 
master. 

To avoid confusion I retain throughout the original 
names, which, in most cases, are indicative of the topo- 
graphical situation. Here is a list of the sections, the 
subsequent names being added, and the figures in brackets 
showing the arrondissements into which the sections were 
ultimately grouped : — 

1. Arcis (7). 

2. Arsenal (9). 

3. Beaubourg; Reunion (7). 

4. Bibliotheque ; 1792 ; Lepelletier (2). 

5. Bondy (5). 

6. Bonne Nouvelle (5). 

7. Champs Elysees (1). 

8. Croix Rouge ; Bonnet Rouge ; Liberte ; Ouest (10). 

9. Enfants Rouges ; Marais ; Homme Arme" (7). 

10. Faubourg Montmartre (2). 

11. Faubourg St. Denis ; Faubourg du Nord (5). 

12. Fontaine de Grenelle (10). 

13. Fontaine Montmorency ; Lafontaine et Moliere ; 
Brutus (3). 

14. Gobelins ; Finistere ; Lazowski (12). 



156 PARIS IN 1789-94 

15. Grange Bateliere ; Mirabeau ; Mont Blanc (2). 

16. Gravilliers (6). 

17. Halle-au-Ble (4). 

18. Henri IV.; Pont Neuf ; Revolutionnaire (11). 

19. Hotel de Ville ; Maison Commune ; Fidelite (9). 

20. He St. Louis ; Fraternity (9). 

21. Invalides (10). 

22. Jardin des Plantes ; Sans-Culottes (12). 

23. Lombards (6). 

24. Louvre ; Museum (4). 

25. Luxembourg ; Mutius Scasvola (11). 

26. Marche des Innocents ; Halles (4). 

27. Mauconseil ; Bon Conseil (5). 

28. Montreuil (8). 

29. Notre Dame ; Cite" ; Raison (9). 

30. Observatoire (12). 

31. Oratoire ; Gardes Franchises (4). 

32. Palais Royal ; Butte des Moulins ; Montagne (2). 

33. Place Louis XIV. ; Mail ; Petits Peres ; Guillaume 
Tell (3). 

34. Place Royale ; Federes ; Indivisibilite (8). 

35. Place Vendome ; Piques (1). 

36. Poissonniere (3). 

37. Ponceau ; Amis de la Patrie (6). 

38. Popincourt (8). 

39. Postes ; Contrat Social (3). 

40. Quatre Nations ; Unite (10). 

41. Quinze-Vingts (8). 

42. Rue du Roi de Sicile ; Droits de l'Homme (7). 

43. Roule ; Republique (1). 

44. St. Genevieve ; Pantheon (12). 

45. Temple (6). 

46. Theatre Francais ; Marseille; Marat (11). 

47. Thermes de Julien ; Beaurepaire ; Regeneree ; 
Chalier (11). 

48. Tuileries (1). 
Of the general meetings but few records are preserved 

at the National Archives or the Prefecture of Police. The 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 157 

proceedings must have consisted mostly of harangues, for 
if the pulpit was silenced, the rostrum was active ; but the 
clubs eclipsed the sectional meetings, especially when in 
proximity. Robespierre, indeed, was president of the 
Place Vendome section in November 1792, when it de- 
clared its want of confidence in Roland, and protested 
against the abolition of the numbering of assignats, on 
the ground that this gave employment to a staff of clerks. 
But that section must have been insignificant alongside the 
Jacobin club, as also the Theatre Frangais section alongside 
the Cordeliers. The attendance at sectional meetings was 
doubtless largest when office-bearers had to be elected. 
About 600 persons voted at an election of the revolutionary 
committee in Bibliotheque section, and in Arcis 466 votes 
were on one occasion cast, but in the Invalides in June 
1794 an election mustered only 135 voters. Florian, the 
fabulist, who, to conciliate the Jacobins, wrote some revolu- 
tionary verses, 1 but was ultimately imprisoned, was a 
speaker at the Halle-au-Ble meetings. The notorious 
marquis de Sade was for a time secretary of Place Ven- 
dome section. There he pronounced a eulogium on Marat 
and Lepelletier, and drew up a petition for the dedication 
of the disused churches to Reason and Virtue, the section 
printing a thousand copies of it. 2 Duelling was discussed 
and denounced in Place Louis XIV. section. Certificates 
of " civism " seem to have been sometimes applied for at 
general meetings, as a substitute for, or preliminary to, 
appearance before the Revolutionary Committee. So also 
with certificates of poverty, with a view to relief from the 
Charity Committee. Numerous cases of this kind appear 
in the Arcis register. The power of withholding a 
certificate of civism, or carte de sfirete' t was vested in 
the sections as well as in the Commune, and in the 
Thermes section we find eleven ex-nuns in a batch making 

1 Les Muses Sans- Culottes, 30 germinal, an 2. 

3 He was imprisoned at the Carmelites and at St. Lazare. On his release he 
repudiated his wife, who had shown great devotion to him, though her affectionate 
letters evoked contumelious or reproachful replies. Napoleon subsequently con- 
signed him to Bicetre, among the lunatics. 



/..; 



158 PARIS IN 1789-94 

such an application. After the 6th July 1794, moreover, 
four witnesses to character were required for obtaining a 
card. Ticket-holders alone could attend the general 
meetings, and ex-nobles, by a decree of the 16th April 
1794, were expressly excluded. A conversation in the 
antechamber of the Revolutionary Tribunal, reported 
by an "observer of public opinion," 1 informs us that if 
at the Place Vendome meetings a citizen made a proposal 
not acceptable to clubbists, they, even though only ten in 
number, raised a clamour, denounced the speaker as an 
intriguer, and silenced all opposition. Sometimes, more- 
over, according to Thuriot, 2 the Jacobins went early, 
passed resolutions, informed the later comers that the 
business had been transacted, and then carried these 
resolutions to other sections as having been unanimously 
adopted. No wonder if quiet citizens kept away, so that 
appeals had to be issued urging a better attendance. 
If Taine is right in estimating the Jacobin mob at 5000 
or 6000, the average number of Jacobins in each section 
would have been about 120, but some sections were much 
more violent than others. Still it is clear that in general 
the majority of the inhabitants were coerced by a noisy 
minority, whose rude signatures may be seen in petitions 
for the execution of Louis XVI. 3 

If the Jacobins thus had their hired brawlers, let us not 
forget that in February 1791, as shown by the iron cupboard 
papers, an elaborate plan was submitted to Louis XVI. for 
hiring speakers, speech composers, applauders, and ob- 
servers (spies) in the sections and battalions, as also stump- 
orators {motionnaires) and applauders at cafes, concerts, 
public gardens, and workshops. Fifteen hundred in 
number, their salaries were to vary from 3000 francs a 
month for speakers to 50 francs for factory operatives. 
The total outlay was to be 200,000 francs a month. There 
is no indication of this scheme having been adopted, but 
the King's endorsement shows that he examined it, and an 

1 Schmidt, Tableaux de la Revolution, ii. 201. 
a Moniteur, xxi. 556. 3 M. 665. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 159 

amended scheme, reduced to 100,000 francs a month, was 
prepared for him. 

We must not imagine, however, that the proceedings 
were all sound and fury, signifying massacre and pillage. 
The minutes of the Invalides show some curious incidents. 
Thus on the 10th June 1794 a man having been appointed 
gendarme, stated that he had no means of dressing be- 
comingly, whereupon one citizen offered him a coat 
and trousers, and another a second coat. Some days 
previously the meeting had nominated ten old men, ten 
matrons, ten boys and ten girls between fourteen and 
eighteen, and ten children under eight (called adolescents /), 
to be escorted by a commissary to the " Fete de l'Eternal." 
Accordingly on the eve of the festival the girls and boys 
attended the meeting by way of rehearsal and sang hymns. 
The president, at the desire of the section, kissed them all 
round. 

The sections, moreover, like the Commune, were waited 
upon by children, who recited Republican compositions, 
and this continued even after Robespierre's fall. At 
Fontaine de Grenelle, on the 18th February 1795, three 
little girls, the youngest under four, and several boys, 
delivered an oration with an unction surprising at their 
tender age. Several other boys and girls had likewise 
announced the delivery of speeches, but as the sitting had 
begun late they could not be heard. On the 8th July 1795, 
however, patriotic recitations were given, probably by 
this disappointed party, a boy of seven reciting a speech 
with the emphasis of an adult. 1 A Venetian who, at a 
general meeting, had attacked a public functionary was 
ordered to be sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal for 
creating a disturbance. He had been fetched, and was 
waiting in the anteroom to be interrogated, when, the 
attendant being despatched on an errand, he seized the 
opportunity of decamping. He was, however, recaptured 
and sent to La Force. The two sentries were punished 
with a week's imprisonment for negligence. Boys were 

X ]F. 7, 2509. 



160 PARIS IN 1789-94 

admitted to the Poissonniere meetings, held first in the 
Royal Mews chapel and afterwards in St. Lazare church, 
in order to learn patriotism. The gallery was assigned to 
women, for in April 1792 the section had begun to admit 
women, either to the floor or to the galleries, but on the 
23rd May 1795 the Convention ordered their exclusion. A 
girl of seven recited the Declaration of the Rights of Man 
to this Poissonniere section. 

Some of the sections were in the hands, at least for a 
time, of the Moderates. Eight of them — Tuileries, Palais 
Royal, Postes, Fontaine Montmorency, Faubourg Mont- 
martre, Thermes, St. Genevieve, and Jardin des Plantes — 
refused, in July 1792, to petition for the King's deposition, 
albeit signatures of sections were sometimes obtained by 
their being assured that all the others had already signed. 
The Thermes in the summer of 1793 twice protested against 
domiciliary visits and arbitrary arrests. The Bibliotheque, 
to which Brissot belonged, was the richest quarter of 
Paris, and its battalion was the only one which was faithful 
to Louis XVI. on 10th August 1792. After the Terror 
it was reactionary, and it headed the rising of Vendemiaire 
(October 1795), yet after the King's death it petitioned the 
Convention to separate the poor little Dauphin from his 
mother and aunt. Alas ! such separations had frequently 
been undergone for a century by Huguenot children. 
Among its members also was Philidor, the music composer, 
who, as he had shown in London in February 1791, could 
play chess blindfolded, which was then considered a 
marvellous feat. His father had been kettledrummer to 
the King, and his whole family were apparently on the 
pension list till 1790, four of them women, and the other 
two, Jean Danican and Claude, drawing respectively 200 
francs and 150 francs. Claude in 1791-92 was one of the 
librarians of the Assembly. On the other hand, some 
sections were from the first Jacobinical. As early as March 
n, 1792, Croix Rouge petitioned the Convention to tax the 
King like other citizens. It was told that this was already 
the law applied to all public functionaries. Poissonniere, 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 161 

invited to a service in St. Laurent for the assailants of the 
Tuileries on the ioth August 1792, declined to attend until 
the statues of the glorious martyrs of liberty occupied the 
shrines of St. Crispin and St. Cucufin. In May 1793 the 
Moderates gained the upper hand in Mauconseil section, 
and, as also the Lombards section, sent a deputation to the 
Convention, but both deputations were arrested by the Com- 
mune. After Thermidor the Moderates of course resumed 
attendance, and in some cases got the ascendancy, so that 
in October 1795 the Convention had to employ Barras, 
and Barras employed Bonaparte, in putting down those 
which had protested against its usurpation in requiring two- 
thirds of its members to be re-elected. 

The Place Royale section was one of the most extreme. 
On the 18th February 1794 it adopted at a general meeting, 
on the motion of Balny, a long memorial to the Convention 
against the indulgences allowed to prisoners. It described 
them as feasting on meat, game, fowls, delicious wines, and 
choice fruits, while innocent citizens were on short com- 
mons, and as amusing themselves with concerts, plays, 
promenades (sic), equivocal interviews, and illicit con- 
versations. Husbands, wives, children, friends, agents, 
besieged the gates, some driving up in carriages, and 
passed the whole day inside in unrestricted intercourse, 
without being searched on arrival or departure. So con- 
tent were the prisoners with their lot that if they were not 
already there they would readily enter as lodgers these 
"voluptuous and sensual palaces." The memorial urged 
that they should be transported, or else have their property 
sequestrated till two years after the conclusion of peace, 
that they should not be allowed to receive visitors, that 
they should live on 3 francs a day, all messing together 
and no extra diet being allowed, and that half a pound of 
meat should be the daily ration. Taking off a large dis- 
count for exaggeration, it is clear that until latterly some of 
the prisons were by no means disagreeable dwellings, and 
according to Hermann, judge of the Revolutionary Tribunal, 
two hundred companions or servants were permitted to 

L 



162 PARIS IN 1789-94 

live in them. The memorial was presented to the Con- 
vention by twenty-four citizens, and two citizens were sent 
to each of the other sections with a printed copy of it. 
The committee of this section were arrested in the spring 
of 1794 on the complaint of the president, for usurpation, 
atheism, and other misdemeanours. Robespierre, who 
ordered the arrest, had, however, to defend his act before 
the Public Safety Committee, which seems to have decreed 
their liberation. 

A fortnight before Robespierre's fall several sections 
resolved on "fraternal repasts." Neighbours in groups 
set their tables in the street and made a common stock 
of their provisions. The Halle-au-Ble" section fixed 7.30 
P.M. as the hour of these gatherings, and it was alleged 
(but this is denied) to have ordered the closing of shops 
at 4.30 in order to facilitate them. 1 But these love-feasts 
were promptly suppressed, Payan denouncing them in 
the Commune, and Barere in the Convention, as Dantonist 
Hebertist intrigues. Gamier Launay, in an abject apology 
to Robespierre for having advocated them, states that he 
witnessed these agapce in the rue Caumartin and the rue 
des Capucines. Hanriot, in his daily general orders to 
the National Guards, had begun by warmly applauding 
these repasts, but had also to retract. On the nth June 
1794 he says : " I saw last night fraternal repasts in 
nearly all the sections. Free men, you have no need of 
praise. Love of country, equality, fraternity, your self- 
satisfaction, fill your hearts. Cherish the recollection of 
your virtuous moments to your last breath." Five days 
later he deprecates toasts to individuals at these gatherings. 
" Such good wishes should embrace all virtuous men, all 
friends of liberty and equality, all members of the one 
great family. Nothing is grander than to toast the 
defenders of the country beloved and of the laws 
cherished by you." But next day he says : " I hope 
that the period of repasts is over. Pure republicans 
have been scandalised by indecorums not befitting free 

1 f. 7, 4437- 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 163 

men. Be wiser in future. Let us be decent, and be 
guided by reason." 1 

The Jardin des Plantes section resolved on the 4th 
December 1792 that the word vous should be abolished 
as a remnant of feudalism, besides being contrary to 
common sense ; tu alone was worthy of free men. In 
Poissonniere section a citizen proposed the disuse of 
the word " regiment," because it was derived from rex, but 
the general meeting dismissed this as childish. 2 

Of the operations of the Charity (Bienfaisance) and 
Civil committees, we have little information, for their 
minutes have not been preserved. These would have 
thrown light on the poverty and semi-famine which 
largely account for Jacobin troubles. The Charity com- 
mittees in the winter of 1793 issued appeals for subscrip- 
tions. They also invited contributions for the equipment 
of volunteers for Vendee, and for sending shoes and other 
necessaries to the army. The citoyennes de Broglie, 
accompanied by their governess, on applying to the 
Champs Elysees Revolutionary Committee for a pass- 
port (October 27, 1793), offered a contribution for the 
Vendee campaign, recruiting for which had been opened 
in the previous May, that is to say, for the war against 
their own friends. Malingering, however, was not 
unknown among conscripts required to fight on the 
wrong side. The Thermes committee appointed a doctor 
to examine pleas of illness or infirmity. All young men 
between eighteen and twenty-five were liable to serve, 
but some, to evade this, shifted their quarters from one 
section to another, or procured forged passports for 
quitting Paris. Others, it was even alleged, after joining 
their battalions, deliberately contracted skin diseases in 
order to be discharged. 3 Sometimes, too, there was 
actual mutiny. The presidents of sections, by a cir- 
cular of April 30, 1793, were directed to warn conscripts 
that if they refused to start they would be escorted by 

1 Journal de la Montague. 
2 Seine Archives, Register Poissonniere. 3 Moniteur, xviii. 483. 



164 PARIS IN 1789-94 

gendarmes to their regiments. Near Cherbourg, on the 22nd 
November 1793, the Tuileries, Champ Elysees, and Invalides 
battalions mutinied, and their mothers in Paris had to 
pretend that they wished their sons to be well punished. 
Three conscripts of the Tuileries battalion were said to 
have shown their royalism at Caen by singing "Oh Richard, 
oh mon roi." Out of ninety-nine on the roll of the Place 
Royale battalion, only fifty responded to the call. Santerre, 
the brewer-general, complained, too, of the number of 
deserters from the Vendue army. Some had probably gone 
over to the Vendeans. Yet many young men were perhaps 
glad to escape Jacobin rule in Paris by joining the army, 
and the Revolutionary Committees got rid of moderates, 
merchants' clerks and others, by drafting them off to 
Vendee. 

Let us now return to the Revolutionary Committees, 
which, though ostensibly chosen by the general meetings 
of the sections, were frequently nominated by a noisy 
minority. By the refusal of civic cards, moreover, the 
general meetings, as we have seen, could be purged of 
Moderates. Vacancies, too, from resignation or death, 
were frequently filled up by co-option, and on the 5th 
September 1793 the Commune was empowered by the 
Convention to remodel the committees, the latter to have 
power to arrest suspects without the intervention of any 
other authority. This practice was condemned by the 
General Security Committee in December 1793, 1 but without 
effect. These bodies, indeed, when once formed, under- 
went very little control either from the sections at large 
or the Commune. They were, so to speak, demagogue 
oligarchy, men, sometimes of the lowest class, invested 
with arbitrary power and behaving like the proverbial 
beggar on horseback. 2 They were, however, amenable 

1 A.D. ii.* 294. 

2 The register of the revolutionary committee at Troyes (Arch. Nat., F. 7, 
4421) shows how in the provinces, just as in Paris, the inhabitants had to apply 
for certificates of civism. Some were refused as being fanatics, aristocrats, 
" egotists," or disguised Moderates. The Troyes committee received numerous 
denunciations, made many arrests, and levied arbitrary contributions. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 165 

to the General Security Committee, which filled up 
vacancies in their ranks. 1 

The work, a combination of the functions of vestrymen, 
magistrates, and policemen, was sometimes so heavy that a 
committee divided itself into two, so that each member 
might not have to attend daily. The bulk of their 
proceedings consists of the interrogation of suspects, in- 
quiries — sometimes very minute and painstaking — into de- 
nunciations, the exchange of communications with other 
Parisian, and also with provincial, sections as to suspects 
and offenders, and applications for relief from the expense 
of a warder by persons confined in their own houses. 
Applications for civic cards were frequently adjourned for 
further inquiry. The committee did not require spacious 
buildings. Two rooms, one an antechamber, were sufficient 
for twelve commissaries. 2 In Beaubourg section an arm- 
chair was bought for the president, and it was to be raised 
above the chairs of the other members. A dagger also was 
to be placed on the table in front of him. Doorkeepers and 
messengers were necessary, and in this capacity women seem 
at times to have been employed, for in August 1795, that is to 
say after the Terror, the committees were forbidden to em- 
ploy women as garqons de bureau? The accumulation of 
papers became considerable, and we hear of a committee ap- 
propriating the mansion of the due d'Uzes for the stowage 
of them. The red caps could be hung on pegs, if they 
were universally worn, as would appear from a resolution 
of the Lombards committee (February 7, 1794) that the 
red caps which had been purchased should be left behind 
by outgoing members for their successors. The sittings 
were in the evening, so as not to interfere with means of 
livelihood, for the allowance of 5 francs a day in de- 
preciated paper currency could not otherwise have sufficed, 
and they frequently lasted till midnight. 

1 See Mellie, Sections de Paris. 

2 I use the word commissary {commissaire) for a member of the committee 
in preference to the uncouth term committeeman. 

3 Archives de la Seine. 



166 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Entering into detail of the operations of the committees, 
I confine myself in general to the period of the Terror, 
and I begin with the arrests of English residents as of 
special interest to English readers. In the autumn of 
1793 the Revolutionary Committees were directed to 
apprehend British and Hanoverian subjects as hostages 
for the members of the Convention captured at Toulon. 1 
Those who had come to France before the 14th July 1789 
were exempt, and indeed were placed on the roll of electors, 
for this was the case with Henry Sykes, jeweller in the rue 
St. Honor6, maternal ancestor of the Waddingtons. Men 
who had been employed in French factories for six months 
were likewise exempt, as also school children under twelve, 
and older children, provided the persons with whom they 
lodged vouched for their civism. It was easy to discover 
these Britons, for in July 1791 a census of foreigners had 
been taken, and every householder, as we have seen, 2 
had more recently been ordered to post a list of inmates 
outside his door. Accordingly on the 10th October the 
Place Venddme committee, dividing itself into six sub- 
committees, went the round in search of prey. Among 
the prisoners 3 was Richard Chenevix, nephew of the Bishop 
of Waterford, a youth of nineteen destined to be an 
eminent mineralogist, a friend of Sir Joseph Banks, and 
one of the earliest contributors to the Edinburgh Review. 
He was living in the rue Neuve des Maturins, and on the 
7th May 1794, while still a prisoner, he presented to the 
section his oats and hay, having apparently sold his horse, 
so that he had no use for fodder. A John Campbell, also 

1 On the 8th Sept. thirteen Irish students, Cruise, Foley, MacMahon, Fitz- 
patrick, MacCurtin, Molony, Murphy, O'Berne, MacKenna, O'Carroll, Minorty, 
O'Ronan, and Diggon presented the Convention with an address deprecating this 
measure. They urged that the Irish colleges had been founded by refugees, that 
the students were preparing to earn a livelihood, that they sympathised with 
the Revolution, and that but for the English yoke Ireland would eagerly follow 
the example of France (C. 27 1 ). 

2 See p. 130. 

3 At first taken to the sectional lock-up they were consigned to the Luxem- 
bourg, which thus on the 15th Oct. had ninety-seven inmates, mostly English. 
They were, however, after a very short time relegated to various other prisons. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 167 

arrested, seems to have been his servant, for on the 25th 
April 1794 he obtained leave to remove his few effects to 
Chenevix's house, as he was unable to continue paying 
rent for his lodgings. There was also a man named 
Arkwright, with his wife and ten-year-old daughter. The 
girl, indeed, was properly exempt, but, having no one to 
take charge of her, she was conducted to the section 
headquarters until a house of detention had been provided. 1 
Fortunately Arkwright was able on the 8th January to 
prove that as an artisan he was entitled to exemption, and 
he and his wife were released. 

The commissaries evidently did not err on the side of 
leniency in considering exemptions, for they arrested the 
widow of Colonel Dromgold 2 — Dr. Johnson spent a 
pleasant afternoon in 1775 with Dromgold, then head of 
the Military School — but she too was liberated on the 26th 
November, on proving that her husband was born at St. 
Etienne in 1715. While, moreover, the French wife or 
widow of an Englishman was considered English, the 
English wife of a Frenchman was illogically regarded as 
having retained her nationality. Jean Goebel, on the nth 
October 1793, vainly presented himself with his three 
children before the Convention to plead for the release of 
his English wife. He stated that she had been six years in 
France, that being himself disabled from work she had sup- 
ported the whole family, and urged that she might at least be 
allowed to remain in the house under guard to give birth 
to a fourth child. The Convention declined to interfere. 3 
An Englishman named Billington could not speak French, 
and as the commissaries could not understand English they 
sent him to the General Security Committee. Even doctors 

1 Belanger, an architect and landscape gardener, complained that a house 
which he had let out in flats was seized upon by the Place Vendome section, which 
turned out the occupants and crowded sixty-three English into it. He was 
threatened that if he remonstrated he would himself be arrested. 

2 Dromgold went to London in 1761 as secretary to the due de Nivernais, the 
French ambassador. His wife, who had charming manners, was an excellent 
amateur actress. Horace Walpole renewed acquaintance with them in Paris. 

3 C. 275- 



168 PARIS IN 1789-94 

were arrested, for three English practitioners, whose names 
are given as Lagny, Delany, and Oromain (Horsman ?), 
were arrested by Thermes section, and though several 
citizens interceded for them the Committee declined to 
release them without consulting the General Security Com- 
mittee. Dr. O'Neil, on account of his age, was allowed for 
a time to remain under guard at the Eudist monastery, but 
in July 1794 was consigned to the Luxembourg. Yet 
doctors, even if natives of countries at war with France, 
should have been left undisturbed if still in practice. 
Edward Slater, who had imprudently signed the petition 
against the muster of 20,000 National Guards near Paris, 
was arrested with his wife and stepdaughters, Mary and 
Rosamund Perkins. He protested that he was a member 
of a Radical society in London, and had contributed to the 
patriotic fund for the French army. The whole family 
were prisoners at their lodgings, with a warder. After a 
time the warder was withdrawn, and the landlord became 
surety, the seals on their effects being removed ; but the 
seals were replaced, and not again removed till the 17th 
November 1794. Nicholas Joyce and Christopher White, 
cotton-spinners, had at first been exempted as tradesmen, 
but having been denounced, their papers were examined 
and they were ultimately arrested. Joyce died on the 
23rd February 1794 at the Benedictine monastery, leaving 
three girls, the eldest only fourteen. Taylor, apparently a 
friend, waited on Observatory section to hand over eleven 
letters belonging to Joyce, and the section agreed to write 
to the Minister of the Interior respecting the maintenance 
of the children, who were inmates of various prisons till 
the following December. Ten students of the Irish 
College were placed under guard at the college. One of 
them was Thomas MacKenna, who had been eight years in 
France, and who in 1791, placing himself, pistol in hand, 
at the gate, had prevented a mob from breaking into 
the building. Two of his comrades, MacSheehy and 
Currey, wishing to join the French navy, the Observa- 
tory section resolved on recommending them to the 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 169 

Government. We shall hear of MacSheehy again. 1 Another 
student, O'Carroll, was liberated on the assurance of 
Kearney, the head of the college, that he had discharged 
his civic duties. The Lepelletier section found that several 
Englishmen had taken flight. One of those remaining, Sir 
John Lambert, Bart., a banker, produced letters of natural- 
isation dated 1762, but nevertheless was eventually im- 
prisoned — perhaps as a banker, for that calling was peculiarly 
obnoxious to the Jacobins, to whom traffic in stocks and 
quotations of specie were an abomination. I doubt, 
indeed, whether a single banker who remained in Paris 
escaped arrest. 

Even Englishwomen who had married Frenchmen 
were not spared. Louis Galas, a descendant of the Pro- 
testant victim of Toulouse, vainly petitioned the Con- 
vention for the release of his English wife, " whose 
only fault was having been born among a people hos- 
tile to the rights of mankind." Calas had spent twenty- 
five years in England, returning to France at the Revo- 
lution in the hope that better days had dawned for her. 
The Convention nevertheless "passed to the orders of 
the day," 2 yet surely such a woman was entitled to claim 
French citizenship. 

Some sections, however, were more forbearing than 
others. Thus an Englishwoman named Thompson, ar- 
rested by the Gravilliers section and imprisoned in one 
of the British convents, was on the eve of her confinement. 
On the 31st October 1793 the Quinze-Vingts section made 
representations in her favour to Gravilliers. The latter 
commended this humane intervention, and directed that 
she should be taken back to her hotel in the rue du Temple 
and remain there under guard till her delivery. This 
implies that commissaries visited the prisons in their 
sections, or else that the jailors sent information to 
them. The committees even claimed jurisdiction over 
jailors whose prisons were situated within their section. 
Thus the Observatory section called Haly to account for 

1 See p. 343. 2 c - 275- 



170 PARIS IN 1789-94 

employing a prisoner to keep his books, and for allowing 
visits and extra fare. Yet Haly was arrested after Ther- 
midor as a Robespierrist. That section likewise, on the 
12th October 1793, forbade the English prisoners at the 
Benedictine monastery to receive visitors, or to write 
letters except in French, and these only for obtaining 
necessaries. Archdeacon, who had come to Paris from 
Douai, was arrested ; but Keller, of the Benedictine 
monastery, vouched that he had been five years at Douai 
and had come solely on college business. Kellet was 
allowed as bail for him pending inquiry, and Archdeacon 
eventually received a passport for Douai. An English- 
woman named Jackson, housekeeper to the Countess de 
Mirepoix (who had fled to England, and whose husband 
was awaiting the guillotine), was arrested, released, and 
re-arrested by the Halle section. 1 

Nor were the committees sparing in the exercise of 
their power of arresting suspects. The Journal de Paris 
shows, especially from May 1793 to March 1794, the 
swelling crowd of inmates in every prison. " Incivism " 
was the usual accusation, but in not a few instances, with 
conscious or unconscious irony, we read "no reason as- 
signed." Harmand de la Meuse, a deputy, vouches in 
his Anecdotes de la Revolution, for the fact that Mile, de 
Chabannes, aged eleven, was arrested, according to the 
committee's list, "pour avoir suce le lait aristocratique 
de sa mere." Her mother, also a prisoner, and probably 
an admirer of Rousseau, had indeed suckled her. The 
Place Vendome committee arrested Claviere, who was 
persecuted to death by one of its members, Arthur. At 
Arthur's instance it also pressed at the beginning of 1793 for 

1 The English were mostly released in the autumn of 1794. On the 26th 
Sept. James Gamble, Louis Masquerier, James Hartley, Thomas Arkwright, and 
A. Howatson, petitioned the Convention for the release of their countrymen, and 
this was followed up by a memorial from fourteen prisoners, Este, S. Mosse, 
Rowles, Mowat, Thos. Gattie, Hugh Massey, Ralph Jarvis, Thos Fidler, Geo. 
Maskell, J. Billson, Thos. Packman, Wm. Hill, James, and Lynch. (AF. ii. 29.) 
If Monroe had not arrived in Aug. 1794 and claimed Paine's release an an Ameri- 
can he might perhaps have been liberated as an Englishman. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 171 

the arrest and trial of Lamarche, formerly entrusted with 
the manufacture of assignats. Lamarche was the fellow vic- 
tim whom Madame Roland wished to be executed first, that 
he might not be unnerved by witnessing her death. From 
the autumn of that year, however, the committee was, 
with some exceptions, disposed to listen to reasonable 
requests. It declined, indeed (December 8), to intercede 
for the release of the notorious de Sade, and it refused 
to allow a man-servant to go and see his captive master 
unless he chose to share his imprisonment. It likewise 
declined to endorse a request from the Bibliotheque sec- 
tion that prisoners should be treated leniently. Yet it 
had itself, on the 16th October, petitioned the Convention 
to release persons arrested simply on account of their 
former position, but ascertained to be good citizens ; and 
on the 26th November it resolved that arrests should not 
be made on anonymous or unwritten denunciations. It 
also allowed the Princess of Monaco, citoyenne Grimaldi, 
as she styled herself, divorced wife of Joseph, second son 
of the reigning prince (she had adroitly presented it with 
a hundred muskets), to be a prisoner in her own house on 
the ground of ill-health, a plea verified by two of its com- 
missaries and by a surgeon (November 3, 1793). It even 
removed the seals from her property, though it refused 
(January 10, 1794) to liberate her, which liberation she 
had claimed as the wife of an Italian. 1 Permission was 
given to Lacoste, a surgeon, to visit the house of detention 

1 The principality had been annexed to France, together with Savoy and 
Nice. The Place Vendome register says nothing more of her, but hearing that 
she was to be haled to prison she escaped from her house, took refuge for a time 
with a female friend, then, fearing to compromise that friend, she went into the 
country, but ultimately returned to Paris and was arrested. On the loth June 
1794 she was sent to the Conciergerie for trial, on the 26th July she was con- 
demned to death, and she was executed on the 27th, being one of the last batch 
of victims. Twenty-four hours' grace would have saved this unfortunate prin- 
cess, but the doctor had certified that morning that her plea of pregnancy 
and that of two other women were unfounded. She is said to have rouged 
before starting for the scaffold, that if she turned pale it might not be detected and 
attributed to fear, but I doubt whether rouge was obtainable at the Conciergerie. 
Her father-in-law, Honore (seventy-three years of age), although he had not pro- 
tested against the annexation of his territory, but had quietly remained in Paris, 



172 PARIS IN 1789-94 

and render all the succour required by humanity (Decem- 
ber 5, 1793). The wife and mother of Lecouteulx were 
allowed to visit him in prison, as also were citoyenne 
Dibove's children (February 3, 1794). Davrauge was 
permitted, accompanied by a sentry, to go to public 
baths, but not until a doctor had certified that he required 
them (July 22). The section made many domiciliary 
visits in search of arms, and it had many requests for the 
withdrawal of sentries from persons unable to bear the 
expense. 

The Observatory section was very considerate in such 
cases. Indeed, in May and June 1793 there were com- 
plaints that the aristocrats (read Moderates) had got the 
upper hand in several sections, had changed the committees, 
and had insulted "patriots." The Mail Revolutionary 
Committee strenuously pleaded for the release of the 
innocent. On the 5th June 1793 it resolved that "suspect" 
was so vague a term as to lead to the oppression of 
good citizens, that there ought to be a stricter definition, 
and that political opinions should not render a man a 
suspect unless he had employed illegal means of enforcing 
them. It pledged itself to do its utmost for the release 
of persons illegally arrested, and to assist even those legally 
apprehended as far as law and humanity allowed until 
they were proved guilty. Again, on the nth June the 
section sent a deputation to the Commune to plead for 
the release of all persons arrested on mere suspicion. 
Chaumette, however, told them that they had been duped 
by the reactionaries, but that he hoped in four days to 
make this section one of the most fanatical {enrage) in 
Paris. He shook hands with and flattered them, and the 
Commune directed some of its members to go and reinstate 
the old Revolutionary Committee which had been dis- 
missed for having made illegal arrests (June 8, 1793). 1 

where he had presented horses and money for the equipment of volunteers, was 
arrested in Sept. 1793. Petitioning the Convention for release, he stated that his 
courtyard and stables were full of carts and horses also intended for volunteers. 
1 Moniteur, xvi. 597 ; Schmidt, Tableaux de la Revolution, ii. 26. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 173 

On the 21st June the committee complained that persons 
against whom no proofs existed had been liberated on 
bail, whereas they ought either to have been brought 
to trial or released unconditionally. 1 It resolved that 
in case of fresh arrests a general meeting of the section 
should be immediately convened, and a deputation was sent 
to the General Security Committee to ask for the repeal of 
the law against suspects as giving "too dangerous a lati- 
tude to mistake or malice." Yet this very section arrested 
a lawyer named Mousnier, who, to oblige a friend, had 
asked it to hand over 50 francs to a relative imprisoned 
in the lock-up, and despite his plea that he was a born 
sans-culotte, he was condemned with the Luxembourg 
batch of victims. 

The Tuileries committee, on the other hand, was by 
turns rigorous and lenient. In September 1793 it drew 
up a list of seventy-three suspects to be arrested, while 
forty-one other persons were to be disarmed, and four to 
be watched. Among the arrested was the whole Noailles 
family and Volney. The Noailles were mostly guillo- 
tined. Volney, who had pondered over the ruins of 
Palmyra and now witnessed the destruction of the French 
monarchy, was arrested on account of his intimacy with 
Lafayette, but his manuscripts were found to be patriotic 
in tone. It was further urged that when visiting Corsica 
he had shunned Paoli, and that he had lost an estate by 
the Vendee insurrection. The committee consequently 
twice (December 31, 1793, and January 10, 1794) petitioned 
the Public Safety Committee for his release ; but he was 
nevertheless detained till after the fall of Robespierre. 
Lucia, a bookseller, being ill, was allowed by the com- 
mittee (February 9, 1794) to remain in his own house, 
watched by "two good sans-culottes, fathers of families," 
and this continued till his death on the 24th May. 

In April 1794 the committees had to grant passports 
to ex-nobles and foreigners forbidden during the war to 

1 In the Pantheon section numerous persons were discharged on bail. 
(F. 7, 2522.) 



174 PARIS IN 1789-94 

reside in Paris, in fortified towns, or in ports. Unpleasant 
as Paris had become, people doubtless fancied that if they 
remained in the city they might by bribery obtain interviews 
with their incarcerated friends or relatives. Anyhow they 
had stayed in order to be near them. Driven from Paris, 
they now sought refuge in the suburbs. George Sand's 
father, then a youth of sixteen, took lodgings at Auteuil, he 
and his captive mother agreeing at a fixed hour daily to 
gaze at the dome of the Pantheon and think of each other. 
The suburban authorities, whether from interest or humanity, 
favoured these refugees. At Neuilly the villagers spoke of 
them as better than their persecutors. 1 At Passy, gather- 
ings of ex-nobles, according to a complaint of the Roi de 
Sicile section, had been permitted, for which the village 
authorities were reprimanded by the General Security Com- 
mittee. The Auteuil section remonstrated against the arrest 
of Madame de Boufflers, and vouched for her patriotism, 
but its appeal was ineffectual, and she saved her life only 
by monthly bribes to Fouquier Tinville. 

As for the Paris sections, even if they were inclined 
to leniency, their committees were being constantly stirred 
up by the Commune or by the General Security Committee. 
Stricter watch over strangers was enjoined on the 28th 
March 1794, and a list of parents of emigres inhabiting 
the section was ordered on the 21st April. The com- 
mittees were also required to furnish a daily report on 
victualling and stockjobbing. It is but fair to the Con- 
vention committees, however, to say that they strove to 
check section abuses by requiring lists of persons detained 
in lock-ups and guard-houses, and by appointing on the 
14th May 1794, a so-called "popular commission," which 
was to prepare a list of suspects, so that the committees 
might release the innocent and remit the others to the 
Revolutionary Tribunal. But it is not easy to say how 
far this step was actuated by humanity or how far by 
the extreme difficulty of finding sufficient prison accom- 
modation. 

1 F. 7, 4437. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 175 

It would have been strange if the arbitrary powers 
of the Revolutionary Committees had not been abused, 
and of such abuses some curious examples may be cited. 
The districts, indeed, had set the example of tyranny, 
for in 1790 the clergy and churchwardens of St. Nicolas du 
Chardonnet protested before the Ecclesiastical Committee 
of the National Assembly against an order of the district 
that plain, and not short-bread should be used at the 
Sunday high mass as pain binit, that no tapers should 
be ranged round it, and that the taper held by the 
distributer of the bread should be of a specific weight. 
The petitioners urged that the tapers belonged to the 
church, that they were utilised in low masses, and that 
there had hitherto been no complaint against a practice 
which had prevailed for centuries. 1 

As the Revolution advanced petty tyranny increased. 
Antoine Georget, who had retired from a wholesale grocery 
in the parish of St. Eustache, had taken a house with 
more than an acre of garden stocked with fruit trees, in 
the rue du faubourg St. Denis. He had been in England, 
and his knowledge of England may account for Thomas 
Paine and several of his friends becoming his lodgers. On 
the night of the 29th November 1793 Paine heard a knock 
at the gate, and looking out of his bedroom window saw 
Georget going with a candle to see what was wanted. 
Georget himself was wanted, and was carried off to Bicetre, 
which, like the Salpetriere, was usually devoted to ordinary 
criminals, but the prisons were so crowded that discrimina- 
tion had become difficult. Georget was accused of lodging 
Paine and other Englishmen and of never mounting guard 
in his section. He could not plead age in excuse, for he 
was only forty-eight, but he alleged that ill-health obliged 
him to send a substitute. It was even asserted, but without 
a shadow of proof, that he had fled to England in 1787 
because he had embezzled from the church poor-box, 
whereas his accounts had then been duly audited. But he 
had started banking, and all bankers, as we have seen, were 

1 A.D. xix. 67. 



176 PARIS IN 1789-94 

suspects. On the 31st December he was transferred to 
the Carmelite monastery, and while there, in February 
1794, he received tidings that commissaries had visited his 
garden and given orders that the trees should be felled 
and potatoes and beans planted. This step was probably 
inspired by a resolution of the Public Safety Committee 
(19th February) that portions of the Tuileries and Luxem- 
bourg gardens should be planted with potatoes, which 
were then scarce and dear. A Rural Economy Society, 
moreover, had stirred up the sections to require ornamental 
to be turned into kitchen gardens, and some of the sections 
had appointed " agricultural committees " for this purpose. 
Georget addressed an appeal to the Commune, and the 
result was a sharp reprimand to the commissaries. A 
notice was issued by the Commune to the effect that the 
large gardens of aristocrats and lazy monks had not yet 
expiated by useful culture their former scandalous use, but 
that pending measures for this object domiciliary visits 
ought not to be paid by malicious persons in order to make 
such measures appear vexatious. People who tore up a 
fruit tree on pretence of planting a cabbage knew this to 
be a certain way of deprivation of both. Fruit trees 
were requisite, as well as vegetables, and must be allowed 
time to bear. The committee of Georget's section there- 
upon, in a tone of injured innocence, complained that 
the Commune had credited a charge which was totally 
unfounded ; but some of its members must have acted 
in the way described. Let us hope that Georget, when 
released on the 24th September 1794, found his garden 
undisturbed. The Commune itself, however, had discus- 
sions on the utilisation of pleasure gardens, and only 
two days after issuing the above notice warned persons 
whose gardens did not produce in the coming season an 
ample crop of roots or other vegetables that they were to 
be treated as suspects. This warning was repeated on the 
9th March. 

Even diplomatic privileges were not always respected, 
and an attempt was made to carry off the register of 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 177 

marriages and deaths kept at the Swedish embassy by 
chaplain Gambs. 

A deputation from St. Maur complained to the Con- 
vention on the 12th August 1794 that Montreuil commis- 
saries went thither to arrest a man. Finding him. dead, 
they apprehended his brother-in-law on the cy-pres 
principle, and forced the widow to pay 10 francs, as also 
100 francs for their large potations. In like manner the 
Beaubourg section ordered a citizen to remove a crown 
which figured on a picture-frame, and a small fleur-de-lis 
affixed to a child's cradle. The Roi de Sicile section also 
required the removal of a bell -pull on a first story which 
showed a fleur-de-lis. This proves that what a Parisian 
did in his bed-chamber might be proclaimed on the 
housetops. But the committees sometimes struck at 
higher game. On the 4th January 1794 the Marais section, 
with the approval of the Paris municipality, marched to 
Nogent to take down the church bells, arrest the priest, 
and seal up his " shop " {boutique) so as to put an end to 
his noxious influence on the fanatical inhabitants. This 
invasion and usurpation of authority seems extraordinary 
even in the Terror. The committees of the Convention 
occasionally checked such abuse of power, for they 
annulled, in October 1793, a resolution of forty-three 
sections to institute domiciliary visits in order not only to 
search for foreigners, deserters, and arms, but to seize and 
confiscate stores of bread exceeding two days' consumption 
and other edibles in excess of immediate necessities. 1 

The committees were besieged with applications by or 
on behalf of prisoners. It is touching to hear of a woman 
asking the permission of Thermes section to adopt a girl 
of twelve, her parents having apparently emigrated, and 
the schoolmaster to whom she had been entrusted having 
been arrested. It is lamentable, on the other hand, to find 
delation incited or encouraged. On the 19th July 1794 the 
Place Vendome committee resolved on withholding civic 
cards from those connected with suspects or guillotined 

1 Mellie, Sections de Paris. 

M 



178 PARIS IN 1789-94 

persons, unless they proved their patriotism by denouncing 
the abuses committed in such households. This evidently 
refers to servants, who were thus required to inform 
against their employers. Lendormy, the Rolands' laundry- 
man, was summoned, for instance, before the Gobelins 
section on the 18th September 1793 as being likely to know 
Roland's whereabouts. He replied that he still washed for 
Madame Roland, but did not go to St. Pelagie, where she 
was imprisoned, but to her house, where the cook gave 
him the linen. He knew nothing of Roland's movements. 
A hairdresser, moreover, went to the Thermes committee 
in September 1793 to announce his intention of getting 
admission into Moderate clubs by simulated sympathy, 
and thus worming out their secrets. He thought it 
prudent to give this notice, lest his conduct should be 
misconstrued. It would have been a consolation to learn 
that, caught in his own trap, he was imprisoned as a 
Moderate. Delators in the majority of cases were illiterate, 
and, as the minutes inform us, could not sign their names. 
They do not as in England make their marks. At the 
Observatory section there was an open book, in which, as 
in the lion's mouth at Venice which visitors are still shown, 
denunciations could be deposited. Sometimes one section 
made a denunciation to another, and two committees in 
concert would arrest a suspect who happened to be in one 
section but belonged to another. 

It is only fair to say that many denunciations after 
careful inquiry were dismissed. Here are some specimens 
of the interrogatories, in which a humorous element was 
not always lacking. 

New Year's day was still observed, for the Jacobin 
New Year's day, the 1st Vendemiaire (22nd September), 
never obtained recognition ; but Twelfth day (Jour des 
Rois) was not allowed to be celebrated. On the 6th 
January 1794, at the suggestion of the H6tel-de-Ville 
section, which had arrested several confectioners for 
selling gdteaux-de-roif the Commune ordered a general 
search of confectioners' shops, so as to detect "orgies 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 179 

in honour of the tyrant's (Louis XVI. 's) ghost." Next 
day, accordingly, a confectioner named Goriot, in Quatre 
Nations section, was apprehended for selling such cakes, 
"thus tending to fanaticism and servile adulation." On 
being questioned by the police officer he stated that he 
had been accustomed to make the cakes, but that they 
were now called gateaux sans-culottes. Many citizens 
amused themselves by drawing lots for the bean (symbol 
of the King), the winner generally paying for a bottle 
of wine. Customers had entered his shop, exclaiming, 
" It is sans-culotte fete, we must amuse ourselves." 
He knew that yesterday, the 17th Nivose, was the 6th 
January old style, but he knew nothing about this except 
that it was a sans-culotte festival. The police officer, 
thinking the man's answers evasive, sent him to the 
Luxembourg, pending the consideration of the case by 
the section. The committee sent word that though Goriot 
was not an ardent patriot he had punctually performed 
his duties as a National Guard, and that the month's 
detention had been more than ample punishment. He 
was therefore released. Even as late as January 1799 
a member of the Council of Elders sneered at the 
observance of New Year's day and Twelfth day. " Among 
the crowned heads," he said, " there are several who may 
soon be merely bean-kings, and the King of Sardinia 
has already disappeared from Piedmont." But in 1799 
twelfth cakes, though they might thus excite a sneer, 
did not entail the prison or the guillotine. 

A newspaper hawker was arrested for crying " Feuille 
du Chou" (cabbage-leaf) in lieu of "Feuille du Jour." This 
was construed as ridiculing the Feuille de Morale issued 
by the Education Committee of the Convention. In spite 
of his disclaimer of such motives, he was sent by the 
Observatory section to La Force prison. The same 
section, being informed on the 21st March 1794 that 
a cat had broken the seals placed five days previously 
on Chaumette's effects, sent two of its members to see, 
but they found it a false alarm. 



180 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The abbe Sicard, director of the Deaf and Dumb 
institution, pupil and successor of the abbe" de l'Ep6e, 
had a narrow escape from the massacres of September 
1792, and he was again in danger of arrest in 1794. 
A paper thrown over the wall of the institution into a 
neighbour's garden and taken to the Observatory com- 
mittee brought suspicion upon him. Accordingly on the 
10th May Augustin Simon Roussel, one of the inmates, 
was summoned before the committee, and here is his 
interrogatory : — 

How long have you been at the Deaf and Dumb institution ? — 
Three years with citizen Sicard. 

Are you instructed in the French Revolution? — I shall be 
taught. 

How long have you been learning ? — Three or four months. 

What is the National Convention ? — Yes (sic). 

Do you know what a patriot is ? Have you been taught ? — 
(No answer.) 

What is a republican? — Citizens. 

What is an aristocrat ? — It is violence. 

How long have you been taught the Rights of Man ? — Citizen 
Sicard has not taught me. 

Are your comrades better taught than you on the Rights of 
Man ? — No. 

Are citizen Sicard [and seven others named] patriots ? — I believe 
that citizens Sicard and Salvan are fanatics. 

What is your opinion of the other citizens ? — The three patriot 
citizens are [naming them]. 1 

Nothing further then passed, but a later entry shows 
that the committee was still suspicious of the teaching 
given in the institution. 

The abbe" Morellet, one of the philosophers whose writ- 
ings had helped to bring about the Revolution, 2 had also 
to undergo an examination. A malicious female neighbour, 
on removing to Observatory section, where her husband 

1 F. 7, 2516. 

2 His friend Lord Shelburne had procured for him a pension of 4000 francs 
from Louis XVI. on the plea that he had rendered service in the negotiation 
of the Anglo-French commercial treaty. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 181 

had obtained a post, went to that section and denounced 
him as a counter-revolutionist. Observatory forwarded the 
denunciation to Champs-Elys6es section, which promised 
to inquire into it. The Champs-Elys^es register is silent, 
but Morellet in his Memoirs gives a graphic account of 
his interrogatory. He produced a brevet from the Con- 
vention granting him a pension for literary services, and 
he was able to give satisfactory answers to the questions 
of the committee, nearly all artisans, the president and 
secretary alone, he thought, being able to read the brevet. 
He had to retire while they deliberated. On being called 
in he was told there was nothing against him, and he 
might go home sans remords, by which the president meant 
sans inquietude. It was eleven o'clock and raining heavily, 
though it was the 16th July. Morellet had no umbrella, 
but a member of the committee, who had a large one, 
shared it with him, conducting him home through a 
pool of mud in the Champs-Elysees. Fortunately for 
him, this section was one of the most moderate in Paris, 
and but for the malicious woman he would have been 
left altogether undisturbed, though on crossing the Champs- 
Elys^es he could sometimes hear the mob jeering round 
the guillotine, and he occasionally, against his will, met 
the carts on their way thither. Had his lodgings been 
searched, his life would probably have paid the forfeit 
of his preservation of the records of the French Academy, 
which he had secretly carried home and retained till 
1805, to say nothing of a sham memorial to the Public 
Safety Committee in which he ironically proposed that at 
every patriotic festival the bodies of the guillotined should 
be devoured as a kind of revolutionary eucharist. That 
manuscript would certainly have sealed his fate, for the 
Jacobins did not tolerate irony. 

Nothing was too trivial for the committees. On the 
15th August 1793 a journeyman hatter was brought before 
Observatory section for disturbing a Catholic service. 
Witnesses deposed that he had made grimaces and gestures 
of disapproval, muttering that the preacher did not know 



182 PARIS IN 1789-94 

what he was talking about. The section suspected that he 
had been incited by a recusant priest, but the man denied 
this, and pleaded intoxication as an excuse. He was 
ordered a night's incarceration. A laundress, arrested in 
April 1793 for not wearing a cockade, said she had kept 
indoors for a fortnight, and was consequently in ignorance 
of the law, but she promised the Temple section to buy 
one next day, when she would have some money. Another 
laundress, aged 26, arrested as a stranger on the day of 
Robespierre's fall, and required by the Pantheon section 
to give an account of herself, explained that she had come 
to Paris, being sutler to a battalion, to ask the Convention 
for permission to wear, or rather resume, male dress. She 
was accordingly dismissed. Caraccioli, the author of the 
pretended letters of Pope Ganganelli, was called upon, 
moreover, to explain his means of subsistence. 

On the 3rd June 1794 a widow named Cordier, who told 
fortunes by cards, was brought before Observatory section. 
She had had five customers that morning. Wives who 
desired the return of truant husbands took her an egg and 
some of the husband's hair. She also professed ability to 
benefit souls in purgatory. She charged 6, 10, or 15 sous 
for her predictions. She denied that she was ever consulted 
on the events of the Revolution, and represented her clients 
as mostly solicitous about their love affairs. The com- 
mittee, however, apprehensive of the revival of superstition, 
sent her to prison. 

Seditious cries and writings gave the committees 
occupation. An orphan boy, thirteen years of age, de- 
nounced by a citoyenne for scribbling on a wall in favour of 
royalty, was called upon to choose between entering the 
navy and imprisonment — in other words, between an 
ordinary prison and a "prison with a chance of being 
drowned." The navy, however, declined to accept him, 
and he was incarcerated for six months. In June and July 
1794 several men were brought before Gobelins section for 
crying Vive Louis XVI. (who, alas, was no more), or Vive 
Louis X VII. (who was undergoing the brutality of Simon). 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 183 

They pleaded drunkenness in excuse. A young man was 
arrested by the Temple section for singing in the street 
a song in favour of the Muscadins. Five women were 
brought before the Thermes section on the 6th June 1794 
for not wearing the cockade. One was dismissed on account 
of age and infirmity, her son being admonished not to 
let her go out again without the republican symbol. The 
second pleaded that, arriving that morning from the 
country and changing her bonnet, she forgot the cockade. 
She was discharged with a caution. The third was sent on 
to her own section. The other two were released, one on 
account of her youth, the other because she was acting as 
nurse and gave good reasons — we are not told what these 
were — for the omission. 

A girl of nineteen, Cecile Boutmy, was arrested at one in 
the morning for shouting Vive le roi and for declaring that, 
as all her friends had abandoned her, she wished to be 
guillotined. She was so drunk as to be unable to walk. 
She professed no recollection of mentioning the King, but 
remembered saying that she wished to be guillotined ; and 
this was because of a quarrel with her mother. To the 
leading question, evidently put by a lenient commissary, 
whether she loved the Republic and desired its durability, 
she replied in the affirmative. She was handed over to her 
own section, Beaubourg, for further inquiry. But youth 
was not always an available excuse. The daughters of 
General St. Chamant, aged 15 and 19, whose brother had 
emigrated, were imprisoned at the rue de Sevres barracks, 
and were reported to be "though so young, very decided 
in their fanaticism and against liberty." Accordingly the 
Public Safety and General Security Committees resolved 
on the 21st July 1794 that they should be transported. Let 
us hope that Robespierre's fall a week later saved them 
from this fate. 

Occasionally the committees found not excuse but 
defiance. Thus Jeanne Pigeon, aged 23, arrested for 
vagrancy, told the Temple committee, with an audacity in 
contrast with her surname, that she regretted the monarchy, 



1 84 PARIS IN 1789-94 

for she was then better off. She had imbibed these prin- 
ciples from a priest, now dead, whom she had met twice at 
her parents' house — they did not receive him well, how- 
ever — twice at his lodgings, and twice in the street. She 
was handed over to Arcis section. 

Curious incidents here and there find place in the com- 
mittees' minutes. Thus in the Place Vendome section a 
man describing himself as portier de sang guillotine applied 
on the 19th July 1794 for employment. He was apparently 
not earning sufficient for subsistence by washing away the 
blood of the victims. He could scarcely have foreseen that 
in a few days his gruesome occupation would be gone. In 
September 1792 a woman identified her husband's clothes 
at the Morgue du Chatelet, and obtained a certificate from 
the Arsenal section that he perished on the 10th August in 
the attack on the Tuileries. On the 18th October 1793 the 
dyer of Gobelins section reported that though he had 
dyed the committee-room curtains, the device Vive le roi 
was still visible. The committee thereupon ordered the 
curtains to be burnt. On the 10th December the school- 
masters of Fontaine de Grenelle section sent one of their 
number with a petition that a commissary might wait on 
the municipality to urge the payment of their arrears of 
salary. The president, on examining the petition, detected 
faults in grammar and spelling. This fact would have 
shown Taine that commissaries were not all illiterate. The 
schoolmaster, obviously disconcerted, disclaimed responsi- 
bility for the blunders, but he had to receive an admonition 
that children ought to have qualified instructors. Morality, 
as well as grammar, was attended to. The Theatre Fran- 
gais section on the 6th February 1794 applied for the 
expulsion of a drunken member, but the Commune dis- 
claimed any power of interference. Citizen Marie, of Mau- 
conseil section, was found drunk, and though married, living 
with a mistress in the Lombards section, thus " degrad- 
ing the title of public functionary." He was taken to the 
lock-up, and his conduct was reported to the General 
Security Committee (20th May 1794). A member of a 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 185 

provincial committee, two days subsequently, went late to 
bed, after deep potations, refused to open his door on the 
summons of officers of the Lombards section, and actually 
threatened to fire at them through the door. He pleaded 
drunkenness in excuse, and was warned to behave better 
in future. On the 9th September 1793 there were com- 
plaints in Gravilliers section of nocturnal orgies at the 
wine-shops, and the patrols were ordered to commence 
their rounds at an earlier hour, so as to make the drunkards 
go home. A citoyenne in male dress, aged 38, was arrested 
on the 8th August 1793 by the Place Royale section and 
sent to the Roi de Sicile section, to which she belonged. 
She explained that she had adopted male attire in order to 
work as a shoemaker, which craft her deceased husband 
had taught her. She was dismissed, on pain of punishment 
for a second offence. 

The food question, as we have seen, 1 was a great 
difficulty. As early as the 28th January 1792 the Croix 
Rouge section resolved at a general meeting on dispensing 
with sugar and coffee, on account of their dearness. Bakers' 
shops were repeatedly the scenes of disturbances. The 
Thermes committee ordered, on the 16th October 1793, that 
a patrol should be posted at the shops at 4 A.M., but nine 
days later, another disturbance being reported, a strong 
force, headed by commissaries, was directed to be sent at 
2 A.M. Nevertheless, not long afterwards there was again 
a complaint of uproar. 2 Journeymen bakers had to be 
watched in the Halle section (May 1, 1794), lest they should 
sell bread clandestinely to persons not living in the section, 
and as late as August 1795 the civil committee of Place 
Louis XIV. section complained that persons in the country 
hired rooms in Paris in order to obtain certificates entitling 
them to buy bread. In the Temple section on the 18th 
May 1794 it was alleged that butchers favoured certain 
customers — who doubtless paid more than the fixed price 
— and commissaries were sent to see that the meat 
was impartially distributed. But the commissaries were 

1 See pp. 132-135. 2 F. 7, 2511. 



186 PARIS IN 1789-94 

sometimes accused of getting themselves served first, while in 
the Lombards section it was asserted that doctors' certi- 
ficates for meat for their patients were used by other 
persons. Women were brought before the Panth6on com- 
mittee for creating uproar not only in shops but at the 
"fraternal repasts," by singing obscene songs. A gover- 
ness, apparently Irish, Marianne O'Reilly, complained in 
October 1793 to the Ponceau committee that she had been 
overcharged at a wine-shop. And when on the 26th March 
1794 the " maximum " tables or official price-lists were sent 
to the committees, the tanners were denounced by the shoe- 
makers for charging an undue price for leather. 

The Jacobin was of course an iconoclast. All statues 
of kings were levelled or demolished immediately after the 
attack on the Tuileries. 1 The statue of Louis XIV., on the 
site now occupied by that of Napoleon, was treated as the 
Commune of 1871 treated the latter, except that the de- 
struction was more effectual. The four chained figures 
at the base, representing Spain, Holland, Germany, and 
Turkey, had been removed by the National Assembly on 
the 19th June 1790, and are now in front of the Invalides. 
The statue, on the 12th August 1792, was not only pulled 
down by Palloy, but was broken up, and the finger, ex- 
tended with a gesture of authority, was presented to the 
Marseilles deputation then in Paris, " not as an agreeable 
present, but as a symbol of tyranny, which by reminding 
people of that crowned brigand's atrocities may incite in- 
dignation against kings and royalty." The hand passed into 
the possession of Latude, famous for his escape from the 
Bastille, and a foot went to the Museum of French Monu- 
ments ; it is now at the Louvre. The Commune resolved 
to erect on the spot a column inscribed with the list of 
"victims" (anti-royalists) of the 10th August. The statue 
of Louis XIV. in the place des Victoires was also removed, 
and the four bronze bas-reliefs of the pedestal, discovered a 

1 Royal portraits fared no better at Fontainebleau, for on the 31st Oct. 1793, 
at the unveiling of a statue of Marat, all such portraits were taken from the palace 
to form a funeral pile (C. 279). 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 187 

few years ago by an Englishman among some lumber in his 
possession, and presented by him to Queen Victoria, were 
lent by her Majesty to the Paris municipality to figure in 
the International Exhibition of 1900. The Englishman's 
ancestor probably purchased them during the Revolution. 
On the 18th November 1792 the Place Vendome committee 
engaged a mason to efface all heraldic and monarchical 
devices outside public or private buildings. 

Busts of Marat and Lepelletier, the two Jacobin 
" martyrs," were placed in the section rooms, to the accom- 
paniment of songs and speeches, and, revolting as it seems, 
children were taught to venerate Marat. On the 19th 
January 1794 three boys ten to twelve years of age, pupils 
of Hix, read to Gravilliers committee an address described 
as their own composition. "Oh Marat," it exclaimed, 
" quit the Elysian fields and return to the midst of a people 
who adore thee." The address compared the republic to 
a rose, unfolding its petals amid thorns and briars, that 
is to say, monarchs. " Age does not yet allow us to bear 
arms for the republic ; let us help those who are daily ex- 
posing their lives in its defence. Accept, therefore, this small 
offering." The committee ordered 500 copies of this address 
to be printed, for distribution among the other sections. 

I shall show later on 1 with what suspicious alacrity 
the sections repudiated Robespierre, and some of them 
even hastened to renounce their Jacobin appellations. The 
Finistere (Gobelins) section was so eager to repudiate the 
name of Lazowski, a Robespierrist Pole whose bust and 
heart figured on its seal, that on the 7th August 1794 it 
asked all the newspapers to notify the removal of those 
emblems ; but, not liking to waste its stock of paper, it 
simply effaced the heading Lazowski. 

Eight days after Robespierre's fall the revolutionary 
committees, as well as other authorities by whom arrests 
had been ordered, were required to assign reasons for 
such arrests, and prisoners or their friends could demand 
these justifications. Nevertheless the prisons were for a 

1 See p. 472. 



188 PARIS IN 1789-94 

time still pretty full, and in the 9th arrondissement there 
were many applications for permission to visit inmates of 
Plassis and the Conciergerie. 1 Many rooms or effects in 
private houses also continued under seal, for on the 31st 
August 1794, when the Grenelle powder magazine blew up, 
numerous seals in houses in the Champs-Elysdes section 
were shattered, and those on the effects of Mirabeau's 
widow were not removed till the 7th July 1795, when a 
bundle of her papers was sent to the General Security 
Committee. 2 

On the 24th August 1794 the forty-eight revolutionary 
committees were merged in twelve arrondissement com- 
mittees. 3 The general meetings of sections continued, 
indeed, to exist until the 8th October 1796, but the 
allowance of 40 sous was withdrawn on the 21st August 
1794, and the meetings were limited to Decadi, while 
women were debarred from attending. On the 29th 
March 1795, moreover, it was ordered that the meetings 
should be held between twelve and four o'clock, which 
obviously excluded working men. 

The registers of the arrondissement committees were 
in general kept by educated men, and are well written and 
well spelt. Although the guillotine had ceased working, 
denunciations and arrests went on for a time intermittently. 
Thus in the 6th arrondissement, on the 19th April 1795, 
the wife of a locksmith named Lefevre, aged 40, Was 
denounced by a blind musician, Merlier, who had been 
employed in turning her husband's grindstone wheel, for 
saying that Decadi would soon end, that religion would be 
restored, that the Dauphin would ascend the throne, and 
that Paris would be forced by famine to capitulate. She 
denied the charge, and forced Merlier to admit having 

1 F. 7, 2504. 2 F. 7, 2494. 

3 In the provinces, moreover, the committees were reduced in number, no 
parish with a population not exceeding 8000 being allowed more than one, and 
it was significantly stipulated that the members should be able to read and write. 
In February 1795 the limit of population was raised to 50,000, and on the 12th 
June the title "revolutionary" was prohibited. No evidence exists of the 
existence of such committees after that date. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 189 

himself shouted Vive le roi, but he pleaded drunkenness in 
excuse. The woman was dismissed with a caution, while 
Merlier was handed over to the 8th arrondissement. 
The 7th arrondissement committee were amazed one 
morning to find in their room royalist handbills declaring 
a good king to be better than a Constitution without 
bread, and how these had been smuggled in could not 
be ascertained. 1 Bread riots, moreover, whether on a 
small scale in bakers' shops or in mobs marching to the 
Convention, gave employment to some of the arrondisse- 
ment committees. The 6th arrondissement register has 
a full account of a disturbance in a baker's shop, three 
women being implicated, as also depositions respecting a 
mob of women who, on the 27th March 1795, tore off their 
cockades and marched to the Convention. The rising of 
Prairial (20th May 1797) likewise figures in the registers. 
The Arcis general meeting, assembling in Billettes church, 
adopted thirteen resolutions claiming liberty of election 
and repudiating the decree that two-thirds of the Con- 
vention should be re-elected. These resolutions were 
unanswerable, except, indeed, after the fashion of Barras 
and his subordinate Bonaparte, by cannon, and other 
sections sent deputations to notify adhesion to them. The 
6th arrondissement committee took long depositions on 
this rising. 

Some of the prisoners naturally applied on their release 
after the Terror for the restitution of property. Thus 
citoyenne Walsh, on the 8 th October 1794, asked the 8th 
arrondissement for two pistols, and Thomas Macdermott, 
an Irish militia colonel, who had been two years in Paris 
when arrested and disclaimed association with the English 
there, applied on the 3rd October 1795 for a bundle of 
letters and two silver-handled knives. The letters were 
restored, but the knives could not be traced. 

There were also applications by released prisoners 
for copies of the minutes of arrests, but in the nth 
arrondissement these documents could not be discovered. 

1 F. 7, 2498. 



190 PARIS IN 1789-94 

In the 12th arrondissement a number of women, five in 
one batch, asked for and obtained the denunciations and 
warrants under which their husbands had been imprisoned. 
On the other hand the son of Talbot, mason, and member 
of the Commune, guillotined as a Robespierrist, applied 
for a copy of the warrant against his father. He apparently 
meditated some revenge. Kellet, on the 2nd November 
1795, applied for the removal of the seals on the effects 
of citoyenne d'Albestroffe, in Observatory section. This 
citoyenne y for whom he acted as proxy, was none other 
than Clementina Walkingshaw, the Young Pretender's 
mistress, who had taken the title of countess Albestroffe. 
She was apparently then living either in the provinces or 
abroad. This is almost the last trace to be found of her. 
She died at Freiburg, Switzerland, in November 1802. 

It will naturally be asked whether the sectional com- 
mittees were brought to book for their delinquencies. 
There were some cases of exposure, but scarcely any of 
actual punishment. When their papers had to be handed 
over to the arrondissement committees, the Croix Rouge 
register showed a gap of thirty leaves, though an artful 
attempt had been made to disguise the mutilation by the 
insertion of fresh leaves with concocted entries. Out 
of more than 300 prisoners, fifty had been charged 
from 3 to 12 francs a day for expenses of detention, 
irrespective of board. "Some of the best society in the 
faubourg St. Germain," says Taine, "were quartered in a 
fine house and garden in the rue de Sevres, and out of 
160 prisoners only two were guillotined." Thirty inhabi- 
tants of the Luxembourg section complained of exactions 
and thefts, but among them there did not figure the aged 
due de Nivernais, albeit he had been "bled" to the tune 
of 3000 francs, besides 20 francs a day for five months 
to four warders in his house feeding at his expense ; 
but he probably considered himself fortunate, even by 
being the milch-cow of the section, to have escaped the 
guillotine. 1 As for the thirty complainants, an inquiry 

1 Perey, Fin du XVIII. Steele. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 191 

was instituted, which showed that 67,654 francs had been 
extorted from them, of which sum only 2855 francs 
had been paid into the section treasury. The remainder 
had been appropriated by commissaries or their subor- 
dinates. 

Many of the complainants were widows. One of the male 
sufferers, placed under arrest in his own house, had been 
assigned four warders, who each for eight months received 
8 francs and for the following two months 5 francs a day, 
besides board — all at the poor man's expense. A woman 
in like manner saddled with two warders was coerced the 
day before her death into giving one of them 1500 francs. 
A retired watchmaker, on refusing to pay 15 francs a day 
for the privilege of detention in the barracks, had been 
thrown into a dungeon till his wife and son handed over 
the money. Nor was this all. He had been required to 
sign promissory notes for 40,000 francs, on pain of being 
again consigned to the dungeon. His family compromised 
the claim by paying 19,000 francs. A notary had been 
compelled to give 2892 francs for his son's prison main- 
tenance. Sixteen francs a day had been sometimes 
levied for this compulsory board and lodging, but one 
man, though detained only a few days, had been charged 
1690 francs. Another paid 7000 francs. As the price of 
release, a widow had given 1200 francs and a promissory 
note for a like amount. 

There had, moreover, been actual theft. Among the 
intercepted and confiscated letters of one complainant were 
drafts from Italy for 800 francs or 900 francs. A watch 
had been taken from a widow. Seventeen loaves of sugar 
had been abstracted from a hairdresser by Thomas Francis 
Stanley, an English watchmaker, and on demanding resti- 
tution the man had been imprisoned for four days till he 
withdrew his claim. Another victim had been required 
to cancel a debt of 350 francs against a commissary's friend. 
He had refused, but after a few days' incarceration had 
yielded. He had nevertheless been kept in prison till the 
fall of Robespierre. One prisoner had paid 270 francs for 



192 PARIS IN 1789-94 

a month's detention. 1 Madame de Narbonne testified that 
she had been called on to pay a lump sum of 10,000 francs, 
but could not promise more than 2000 francs a month, 
and had paid the first instalment. The committee's 
accounts showed an alleged outlay of 6535 francs in five 
months for building repairs. A carpenter was entered as 
having received 3150 francs, whereas he had received only 
1790 francs. 310 francs was charged for the arrest of the 
Princess of Monaco, and 888 francs for torches and other 
expenses of the search for British subjects on the 12th 
October 1793. Altogether the alleged expenses of arrests 
came to 9000 francs. 17,640 francs was also charged for 
warders, though nineteen at 3 francs a day should in eight 
months have cost only 13,680 francs. Warders for persons 
prisoners in their own houses figured for 12,365 francs, fuel 
for 3546 francs, and a locksmith (Olivier, himself a commis- 
sary) for 1336 francs. No vouchers were produced, yet 
the committee had the effrontery to claim 3469 francs as a 
balance due to them. In November 1794 twelve commis- 
saries were prosecuted for embezzlement. Most of them 
were tradesmen — a coach-painter, a gilder, a tallow chand- 
ler, &c, but one, Piccini, a native of Marseilles, son of the 
composer, and himself a musician, was described as a man 
of letters. Well might the indictment remark — " In the 
critical circumstances of a revolution, those who should 
have set an example to other functionaries and to the mass 
of citizens have shamelessly abused the confidence of the 
people whose interests they professed to be constantly 
espousing, while really seeking only to satisfy their in- 
famous cupidity." Ten of the twelve were convicted, and 
sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment and six hours' 
exposure in the pillory. Olivier, the locksmith, escaped 
the latter humiliation, at least for a time, by stabbing him- 
self, though not seriously. The other nine, on the 28th 
November 1794, underwent the hootings of the crowd. 

1 Desmoulins complained in his Vieux Cordelier that his father-in-law, 
Duplessis, confined in a guard-house, had to pay the Revolutionary Committee 12 
francs a night for his bed. 



THE PARIS SECTIONS 193 

Piccini was one of those acquitted. But with the exception 
of a few lines, reprinted by M. Aulard in his Reaction Ther- 
midorienne, the newspapers of the time took no notice of the 
trial, and had not M. Sorel published the documents in 
his Convent des Cannes in 1863 all details of these misdeeds 
would have perished by the burning down of the Hotel de 
Ville in 1871. They seem to have been committed before 
November 1793, when the Carmelite monastery ceased to 
be a sectional lock-up and became a public prison. 

The Roule section also instituted proceedings against its 
commissaries for embezzlement, and the Lombards section 
appointed a committee to receive denunciations, but we do 
not hear of any result. In the Thermes section, a com- 
mittee, nominated on the 18th February 1795 to examine 
the papers of the revolutionary committee, reported that 
many documents, presumably of an " incendiary " character, 
were missing, and that quiet citizens had been deterred from 
attending the general meetings, or if they did go had been 
terrified into silence by threats of a purge as practised at the 
Jacobin club. In the Postes section there was a similar 
investigation into malpractices. The report, presented on 
the 10th December 1794, showed that the commissaries 
were irregularly elected, that vacancies were filled up by 
co-option, and that on a critical occasion thirty inhabitants 
of the Mauconseil section came in and rendered it a joint 
meeting of both sections, which was quite illegal. Any 
objector to the resolutions proposed was threatened with 
arrest, and the meetings were spun out to a late hour, so 
that moderates might be tired and leave before the vote 
was taken. The most esteemed and patriotic citizens were 
imprisoned, or subjected to disgraceful annoyances. The 
twenty-one persons who had thus usurped authority were 
held up to the contempt of all good citizens and to the 
avenging sword of justice. It does not, however, appear 
that any prosecution was instituted, and no charge of 
embezzlement is preferred. 

In the 6th arrondissement ex-commissaries were sued 
and fined for the improper seizure of provisions, and in the 

N 



194 PARIS IN 1789-94 

7th some of the ex-commissaries were arrested by the 
General Security Committee, but we do not hear of any 
prosecution. Cambon, moreover, complained in the Con- 
vention in November 1794 that none of the Paris sections, 
though repeatedly pressed, had sent in accounts of the 
revolutionary tax levied by them. It may be presumed 
that some of the money had gone into the commissaries' 
pockets. Even, too, where there had been convictions, 
the punishment inflicted on these miscreants was very 
short. On the 13th October 1795 the Convention annulled 
all condemnations of members of revolutionary committees 
for their misconduct during the Terror, and eight days later 
it ordered the stoppage of all pending prosecutions and the 
release of the defendants. Retribution, as far as the law 
was concerned, was thus at an end. It must be confessed, 
moreover, that irrespective of the expediency, on account 
of the reactionary rising of the 5th October, of conciliating 
the Jacobins, there were strong reasons for thus drawing a 
veil over the past. However deserved punishment might 
be, a multiplicity of prosecutions would have revived pas- 
sions which it was desirable to appease. An Act of 
Oblivion is not consistent with strict justice, but it is a 
lesser evil than wholesale retribution. 

It would have been strange if the stage had not satirised 
these committees. On the 27th April 1795 Ducancel 
brought out at the Varietes " l'Interieur des comites revo- 
lutionnaires, ou les Aristides modernes." The scene was 
ostensibly laid at Dijon, apparently because the committee 
of that town had protested before the Convention against 
the fall of Robespierre, an act of audacity or courage which 
had entailed arrest; but the piece was really a cutting 
satire of Parisian committees, and consequently had a run 
of two hundred nights. An aged ex-prisoner is said to 
have attended every night, exulting at all the hits, and ex- 
claiming, " How I am avenged on those scoundrels ! " 



CHAPTER V 

PARIS DAY BY DAY 

January-June, 1794 
Observers of Public Spirit — Invasion of England, and rumoured Revolu- 
tion — Popular Meetings — Street Groups and Talk — Festivals — 
Amusements — Tricks of Tradesmen — Scarcity — Queues — Quacks, 
Beggars, and Thieves — Sunday and Friday Observance — Shirking 
Military and Sentry Service — Arrests and Prisons — Suicides — 
Negro Emancipation — A Boulevard Burial — Bufifon Jils — Taci- 
turnity and Delation — Pillage — Desecration of Graves — Drunken- 
ness — Strikes — Wedding Feasts — Robespierre's Illness and 
rumoured Arrest — Gambling — Guillotine Scenes — Hubert — Danton 
— Easter — Festival of Supreme Being — Decadi sermons. 

What would we not give, for a diary kept in Paris during 
the Terror ? But none such exists. 1 A diary requires a 
sense of security, whereas domiciliary visits were then 
the order of the day, and the most inoffensive documents 
were liable to suspicion and misconstruction. Even 
Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador, though 
living quietly from May 1793 at Seineport, twenty miles 
from the capital, did not think it safe to continue 
his journal. His diplomatic capacity should have pro- 
tected him from molestation, but in March 1793 men 
entered his house to search, apparently for arms, and 
though they withdrew on his claiming exemption, Lebrun, 
minister of Foreign Affairs, to whom he complained, 
actually justified the intrusion. Madame de Damas, 
moreover, whom he had sheltered at Seineport, was 
there arrested. He himself, too, was once stopped at 
the barriers, -on his way thither, on the plea that his 
passport had expired, and he was likewise arrested in 

1 The "Journal of a Spy," published in 1895, was not authenticated, though 
it may have been based on genuine data. 

19s 



196 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the street for lack of a card of civism and taken to the 
Butte des Moulins section, where an acquaintance for- 
tunately vouched for his identity. All the other foreign 
ambassadors had quitted France, except indeed Reybaz, 
the envoy from Geneva, who was also arrested by one 
of the sections in March 1794, but in that case the 
section was rebuked by the Convention. No wonder, 
then, if private individuals, whether natives or foreigners, 
carefully abstained from recording experiences or im- 
pressions which might have imperilled them. It is true 
that M. Bire, one of the Frenchmen best acquainted 
with the Revolution, has written the Journal d'un Bourgeois 
de Paris, giving chapter and verse for every entry, but 
this is avowedly nothing more than a cleverly executed 
mosaic. It stands to a real diary just as an artificial 
flower stands to a real one. It is necessarily based on 
the newspapers of the time, but those newspapers, partly 
because they did not think it worth while, partly because 
they did not dare, omit much that we should most like 
to know. As for memoirs of the period, they were 
not written till years afterwards, when men's impressions 
were no longer vivid, and when absolute accuracy of detail 
was impossible, besides which they were too often written 
for personal vindication. 

But if we have no diaries we have something closely 
resembling them. Garat, on becoming minister of the 
Interior in March 1793, organised a bureau de ? esprit public, 
not designed, like Roland's previous department of that 
name, to influence public opinion by disseminating news- 
papers and pamphlets, but to obtain daily records of 
public feeling as it existed. Champagny, who had been 
the head of Roland's bureau, served also under Garat, 
and he had at least six " observers " or " commissaries " 
— Dutard, Perriere, Julien de Carentan, Baumier, Blanc, 
and Latour-Lamontagne. Under Pare, who in June 
1793 succeeded Garat, the observers numbered twenty- 
four. Franqueville, the head of the bureau, directed 
them, in September 1793, to wait upon him daily with 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 197 

their reports at 7 A.m., an early hour against which we 
find Perriere remonstrating as incompatible with his 
delicate health. Adolf Schmidt, the author of Tableaux 
de la Revolution Francaise (1869-70), found in the National 
Archives a list of the observers, . with the number of 
reports sent in by each, but he did not find the reports 
of 1794, which he supposed were to be looked for in 
the papers of the Public Safety Committee. They are 
not, however, to be found there ; but among the 200 
boxes of papers of the Revolutionary Tribunal, mostly 
collected by Fouquier Tinville, where I discovered x the 
reports of Pluviose, Ventose, and the first decade of 
Germinal. Dauban, in his Paris en 1794, gives some of 
the reports for Ventdse, but his selections relate almost 
entirely to the food supply. The police reports, which 
Schmidt gives from the 21st Ventdse to the 9th Germinal, 
were apparently compiled from these observers' reports, 
but if so they are very meagre summaries. No later 
reports are to be looked for, inasmuch as on the 12th 
Germinal the Convention resolved that on the 1st Floreal 
the ministries should be abolished, and the observers 
were probably at once dismissed. 2 If their services were 
retained, their reports must have been addressed either 
directly to the Convention committees, or indirectly 
through the " Civil Administration of police and tribunals." 
In all likelihood, however, they were disbanded, for I 
have come upon an application to Fouquier for employ- 
ment as a translator by Perriere, which shows that he 
had lost his post. We consequently hear nothing of 
public feeling at the trial of the Dantonists. The Germinal 
reports, too, are of decidedly inferior quality to those 
of Pluviose. Many are full of denunciations of individuals, 
and we no longer meet with graphic descriptions of scenes 
in the ci-devant churches or with piquant conversations. 

1 W. 174 and 191. 

2 The Minister of the Interior on the nth Germinal handed in to the Public 
Safety Committee three sealed bundles of the observers' reports. This seems to 
imply the abolition of the bureau. 



198 PARIS IN 1789-94 

It looks as though the observers, one named Bacon in 
particular, had either received a hint to be less outspoken, 
or felt it unsafe to write things which might not be 
palatable. 

Of the observers little can be ascertained. Judging by 
the Pluviose reports, the whole twenty-four did not report 
daily, or some may have merely acted temporarily for men 
absent or unwell. Paul Perriere, who was not on duty in 
Pluvidse but acted in Germinal, was a native of Rochelle 
and apparently a Protestant ; he had lived in England and 
in one instance introduces English reminiscences. Latour- 
Lamontagne was a versifier, who, on the 3rd January 1794, 
among the literary grants of the Convention, figures for 
1500 francs. Boucheseiche was a geographer. Grivel was 
apparently the economist and philosopher who afterwards 
plotted with Babeuf and secretly informed against him. 
Siret was the author of an English grammar. Le Breton 
was probably the Noel Le Breton, corporal in the national 
guard, who was imprisoned in the winter of 1791 for 
presuming, while on duty at the Tuileries, to give an 
order that the King should not be allowed to go out after 
9 p.m. Fear of a second escape was ultimately accepted 
as an excuse for his officiousness. Mercier was not Sebas- 
tien, the prolific writer and anti-Copernican, but probably 
Claude Francois, a bookseller and versifier, or possibly 
the Mercier who in August 1792 contracted to coin bronze 
money. 1 Delarue may have been the notary who, in May 
1792, presented to the Assembly a treatise on the Constitu- 
tion. Soulet was perhaps the " Soules " sent as a commis- 
sary to Toulon, who returned to report its surrender, was at 
first disbelieved and suspected of being in English pay, 
and later on was again suspected and guillotined. There 
was, however, a Francois Soulet, who wrote a pamphlet 
on the fall of the Bastille. Pourvoyeur, very aptly named 
for a purveyor of information, was probably the engraver 
whose son in 1868 told Vatel, Charlotte Corday's biogra- 
pher, that when a boy, living in the same house as Marat, 

1 Sebastien, however, had a brother, whose daughter married Holcroft. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 199 

he saw her arrested. 1 Hanriot was probably a brother or 
kinsman of the notorious Robespierrist who commanded 
the national guard. Dugasse translated into a foreign 
language the decrees of the National Assembly. Rolin 
was afterwards a member of the civil committee of the 
Invalides, and Jarousseau of the Piques section. 

The reports vary considerably in quality. Those of 
L. A. Bacon are decidedly the best. Next to him stands 
Dugasse. With the exception of Jarousseau, whose spell- 
ing is rather phonetic, the observers would seem to have 
been men of tolerable education. If there is a general 
absence of style, this argues for their fidelity. While some 
display sagacity, others are naive. Some are very out- 
spoken, others seem to aim at pleasing, rather than 
enlightening, the authorities. Each clearly wrote indepen- 
dently, yet the reports sometimes corroborate one another. 
The observers were manifestly men of no prominence. 
Men of prominence would scarcely have accepted such 
a post, nor could they have mixed so freely with the 
people without exciting^ distrust, whereas these men join 
in conversations evidently without their mission being 
suspected. 

The reports are written on sheets of paper of various 
sizes and quality. Beyond an occasional mark or heading 
in the margin, there is nothing to show what use was 
made of them, but from another document it would seem 
that Franqueville compiled from them a daily report 
to the Public Safety Committee. Several signatures are 
illegible, a common failing to this day in France, and 
a few are not signed at all, the man's handwriting being 
manifestly a sufficient authentication. Pluviose to the 
middle of Germinal was not a specially thrilling period. 
The reports, however, give a vivid picture of Parisian life 
and temper when the Terror had set in, but had not 
reached its climax. They tell us much of the "groups," 
that is to say, of people collecting in the streets to discuss 
events or to be harangued by motionnaires y who were 

1 Cabanis, Cabinet Secret de PHistoire, 1897* 



200 PARIS IN 1789-94 

sometimes women. We see women taking their little 
children with them to the Revolutionary Tribunal, where 
people ate apples and cakes, and even quenched their 
thirst. We notice the approval of the convictions, and 
the dancing round the guillotine, with occasional effusions 
of sympathy at acquittals. We look into the ci-devant 
churches at the Decadi services, and hear recitations by 
children, addresses on patriotism or morality, and de- 
nunciations of religion, when women stamped to mark 
their approval, while men, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, " only 
took snuff." 1 We hear, on the other hand, of the partial 
observance of Fridays as fast-days. We are told a great 
deal of the difficulty of procuring provisions, particularly 
bread and meat, but sometimes also milk or candles. 
We behold people collecting outside shops before daylight 
to wait for their specified allowance, and we hear much 
of violations of the law of maximum, or fixed price. This 
is, indeed, the constant burden of the reports, though 
to avoid monotony I quote only a few of these entries. 
We find Sunday not quite forgotten, as evidenced by 
the markets being thinly supplied or by women donning 
their best clothes. We hear, too, of occasional Catholic 
services, and of the names and addresses of the worship- 
pers being ominously taken down. We find delation so 
frequent that taciturnity sometimes prevails even in 
the cafes. We listen to talk of the expected invasion of 
England, which invasion, it was believed, would be 
welcomed or even forestalled by an insurrection. This 
shows how utterly the French were misled or mistaken 
respecting foreign nations. We hear of wedding feasts 
in the suburbs, of shoplifting, of the swarm of beggars 
with their sham infirmities and their kidnapped infants, 
of gaming-houses, of suicide to avoid arrest, of feigned 
illness to escape military service. We find uneasiness as 
to a second conscription, which would fall not merely 
on young men but on fathers of families. We gaze at 
a funeral procession singing republican songs. 

1 These Decadi services I have reserved for the end of the chapter. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 201 

The newspapers of the time would be vainly searched 
for such episodes as these. The newspapers were too 
full of the Convention and the war to afford space for 
what they would have considered trivial incidents. Many 
of these little occurrences, moreover, could not safely have 
been printed, and could be recorded solely in confidential 
reports. 

But let the " observers " now speak for themselves. 

I PluviSse (January 20, 1 794). 

The announcement of fifty-two merchant vessels being captured 
from the English and brought into Cherbourg was to-day the 
subject of general conversation. 1 Everywhere there are wishes for 
an invasion of England, and this is expected to be soon realised. 
" Why," people say, " does it not take place, as there are already 
30,000 men at Brest, and 600 vessels have been requisitioned ? " 
The cry of the Parisians or rather of all Frenchmen, is that of the 
Romans, Delenda est Carthago. . . . 

The (Jacobin) club has fixed for to-morrow a special meeting in 
memory of the 21st January. The members will be required to 
wear red caps at this sitting. 2 Dugasse. 

A butcher who had closed his stall on account of the dearness 
of meat was forced to reopen, being told that he had formerly 
gained enough. He submitted. Le Breton. 

The popular assembly of Montmartre section was numerously 
attended. More women than usual in the galleries. There was 
talk of various persons in the sections suspected of being Rolan- 
dists. All was referred to the Revolutionary committee. Re- 
publican instructions (catechisms) were then read. The speaker 
was often interrupted [by plaudits] when he spoke of saints, of their 
little dogs, and of the devil. I will not quote any passage, for the 
whole discourse was grand, revolutionary, and contained eternal 

1 The captures mount up to fifty-two vessels, all richly loaded. (Letter from 
Cherbourg, read in the Convention, 1 Pluvi6se.) — Moniteur, xix. 258. 

2 This was Couthon's proposal. Another member suggested that all the kings 
at war with France should be beheaded in effigy. This was not agreed to, but 
portraits of the "French and Russian tyrants" were burnt in the middle of the 
hall, several citizens dancing the Carmagnole, and trampling on the ashes of the 
portraits. — Moniteur, xix. 270, 287. 



202 PARIS IN 1789-94 

truth. It produced a happy effect on the men, while the women 
applauded and could not help laughing. Public spirit is progress- 
ing in this society. Bacon. 

It was rumoured among the people that Pitt, the infamous Pitt, 
had been forced to flee from London, to avoid the fury of the 
people, whose eyes are said to have been opened. Although this is 
related by many persons, it requires confirmation. 1 

Charmont. 

There is a rumour that Pitt is disgraced, that his head has been 
carried about in effigy in London, and that things will soon change. 

Rolin. 

Many young men of the first conscription are met with who 
return to Paris without leave. Several citizens whose sons are at 
the frontier are indignant at finding that these young men do not 
obey the laws, and they demand justice against these mauvais sujets, 
who cause trouble and discourage zealous defenders of the republic. 
. . . What surprises many is to see always the same women in the 
groups and the tribunals. It is inconceivable to see how idle and 
sluttish they are. Charmont. 

Several parishes in the neighbourhood of Paris, particularly 
Louvres, have presented petitions to the committees of various 
sections where the wine-merchants reside who usually supply them. 
The innkeepers are in want of wine for the troops who pass 
through, and for the sick. They intend to go to the Convention if 
they cannot obtain justice. 

2 PluviSse. 
There has been a large gathering of armed national guards to 
celebrate, as is said, the anniversary of the execution of Louis Capet. 
Nothing extraordinary happened. On the suspicion of there being 
in the rue St. Jacques print-sellers who sold many engravings of the 
late King and Queen, people went there and burnt all the pictures. 
Good people still complain of the high price of meat. 

Le Breton. 

1 A letter from Dunkirk, read at the Jacobin club on the 29th Nivose, stated 
that Pitt had been dismissed and an effigy of his head carried about London, but 
the recipient of the letter fell under suspicion and was sent to the General Security 
Committee. — Moniteur, xix. 255. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 203 

The fSte held yesterday, Place de la Revolution, attracted many 
spectators. The people showed at this fete its love of liberty and 
hatred of kings. . . . All passed off in the greatest order. Con- 
spirators were guillotined amid cries of " Vive la Republique ! " 
" P£rissent tous les traitres ! " During this ceremony the people 
sang, danced, and seemed highly satisfied. In a wine-shop, porte 
St. Jacques, the fete was discussed. Women said there could be no 
greater treat to sans-culottes than guillotining on a day like this, for 
if the guillotine had not worked the fete would not have been so 
fine. 1 The death of the tyrant was then discussed. Some said : " It 
is a year to-day that the gros cochon died." " Have you noticed," 
asked a woman of a certain age, " that the weather was then almost 
the same as to-day ? Well, my idea is that fighting is now going on 
in London." People said to her : " It is quite possible, and if not 
to-day, before long there will be no kings in England." 

The popular assembly of Arcis section was very numerous. 
Nearly all the sitting was devoted to the cavalier whom the society 
should furnish to the nation. More than twenty members spoke on 
that subject. At last after a long, very long, discussion, it was 
resolved that to-morrow a citizen should be chosen to go and serve, 
and to be presented to the Minister of War. There were many 
artisans who do not seem to be very revolutionary. 

There are still outcries and murmurs against the pork-butchers. 
In a wine-shop near the ci-devant hotel Beauvais, faubourg du Roule, 
these citizens were discussed. Women said that more than 35 
sous a pound was being paid for bacon, as the pork-butchers sold 
everything sodden and full of salt. " There is nothing to be done with 
these rogues, who combine with the hawkers to sweat us." " This 
morning," said one, "a pork-butcher was near being killed near the 
Croix Rouge for selling bacon quite sodden." 

Warning to the magistrates. — In a cafe near the Arsenal, 
popular societies were discussed. It was said that there would 
shortly be only twelve in Paris, instead of forty-eight. Men who 
did not appear to be good citizens said, "that is the only way 
of baffling the intriguers." 

In the cafes frequented by beaux esprits there was talk of to-day's 
ceremony. It was considered truly republican. It was remarked 
that the Jacobins had contributed to save the republic. 

Bacon. 



1 Thibault, aged 49, one of the tax-farmers, was executed on the 1st Pluviose 
for speaking of the members of the Convention as " pigs." 



204 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The market-women complain that since their husbands have 
been at the frontier they have received nothing of what the law 
allows them. They propose to draw up a petition to the National 
Convention, and ask for the law on that subject to be carried out. 
It is to be presumed that these citoyennes belong to the Contrat 
Social or Halle-au-Ble section. It is essential to forestall them. . . . 

It is inconceivable how the bread supplied by the bakers gets 
worse and worse. There are, however, in the capital some who 
supply very good, which makes me think that some put in rubbish, 
for their bread is not properly baked, and when broken to pieces is 
full of dust. It is urgent to make inspections. Freron. 

Hanriot's staff-officers alone are said to be seen in the boxes and 
stalls of the Opera. They are accused of wanting to succeed the 
fops (muscadins) of the old Opera. Many theatres have been open 
gratuitously in rejoicing for the anniversary of the tyrant's death, but 
at none were there so many as at the Theatre de la Republique, 
which performed the Abolition de la Royaut'e and the Dernier 
Jugement des Rois. 1 

It is remarked that Jacques Roux [ex-priest and member of the 
Commune], who was in the carriage with Capet when the tyrant was 
taken to the scaffold, has been buried exactly a year afterwards. 
He died of his wounds. 2 

Charlatans have for some days been deluding the people in the 
galleries of the Jardin de la Revolution [Tuileries gardens] by ex- 
hibiting for ten sous a bull on whose left horn nature, they said, had 
placed a tricolour cockade. This pretended cockade is merely an 
excrescence in no way resembling what they pretend. 

Dugasse. 

It is surprising to see the number of young men wearing spec- 
tacles to avoid, it is said, the conscription. They affect to be short 
sighted, and have consequently obtained certificates from the 
Health committee. 

Candles now begin to be scarce. The chandlers complain that 
a quantity of suet is taken to make bad soup, leaving none for 
candles. Attention should be paid to this, as it might cause a stir. 

The decree against perjury 3 is much applauded. The people 
had long asked for it, for with such monsters a patriot was not sure 
of returning home [without being arrested as a counter revolutionist]. 

Pourvoyeur. 

1 See Moniteur, xviii. 288 ; xix. 251. 2 See p. 141. 

3 Death penalty decreed for perjury : 4 Nivose. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 205 

5 Phwiose. 

Soup tickets have been distributed this morning among women 
in Indivisibility section. The number of citoyennes was very con- 
siderable. This distribution was made with the utmost order, and 
without any murmurs. 

At La Gaillote, near the boulevard, citizens in tolerable numbers 
were talking of the Revolutionary Tribunal. One of them said it 
was very unfortunate that the revenue farmer [Thibault] who was 
guillotined the other day was now proved to have been innocent. 
The ill-disposed who, under the cloak of patriotism, make capital out 
of everything seized this occasion for censuring the Revolutionary 
Tribunal. Women in a cafe near Nicolet, speaking of this farmer's 
trial, said, " This is how people guillotine ! " They sighed, and this 
was all. These women were well dressed. Bacon. 

In spite of the precautions at the barriers, bread is every day 
passed through. To-day, at three different barriers, several citoyennes 
were arrested for smuggling bread under their petticoats. It was 
noticed that the bakers who supplied them had carefully cut off the 
place where their names were marked. 1 

No butcher has opened his shop. As under the ancien regime^ 
he rests on the ci-devant Fridays. Citizens wanting meat this 
morning as usual were told by the butchers, "You know very 
well that it is Friday, and that there is never any meat on that 
day." 2 They ought to be forced to open their shops. 

Charmont. 

There are still complaints as to wood for fuel, meat, coal, wine, 
and especially candles. Mercier. 

There are complaints of the fraternal society of the French 
Pantheon section, which on its own responsibility has suspended 
the delivery of certificates of civism. A number of persons who 
have only a small income to live on consequently have to go 
without necessaries till it pleases the citizens composing that society 
to grant them their certificates. 

Calumny is still the order of the day. It is desirable to have 
a special law against those whose venomous lips cast the poison 
of calumny on all the objects surrounding them, so as to take away 

* J Bread being sold under cost-price, and the difference being at the expense of 
the municipality, persons living outside Paris were not entitled to it. 

2 Until the Revolution butchers were compelled to close on Fridays, as well as, 
like all other tradesmen, on Sundays. 



206 PARIS IN 1789-94 

not life but honour, reputation, probity, &c. These monsters think 
to shine thus at the expense of the innocent by representing them 
as moderates, aristocrats, federalists, &c. — in short, tarnishing by 
a poisoned varnish the reputation of the citizens whom they attack. 

Rolin. 

The great difference between the price of bread in the country 
and in Paris necessitates supervision at the barriers, which is not 
always sufficiently strict. The country bakers, moreover, are some- 
times out of bread for two or three days running, and then it has to 
be procured at Paris, and the critical barriers have to be crossed at 
all cost. Women accordingly employ all sorts of stratagems, and 
even conceal under their petticoats the bread which they require for 
their children. Dugasse. 

When we see the multitude of men and women who never miss 
attending these gatherings [the Jacobin club, the Cordeliers club, 
the sections, the popular societies, the Commune, and the tribunals] 
we cannot calculate without a shudder the time which they divert 
from useful labours. Dugasse. 

One is more and more astonished at the fearful, more than 
progressive, increase in the price of provisions of all kinds, their 
extreme scarcity, and the deplorable contempt which the shop- 
keepers affect for the maximum. . . . 

On all sides there is complaint of the insults daily undergone by 
the sufferers when being conducted to the scaffold. This is said to 
lower the nation in the eyes of other countries. . . . The hundred 
and odd prisoners brought from Nantes to Paris have been shame- 
fully insulted on their arrival. Le Harivel. 

6 Phiviose. 
A fresh manoeuvre of the ill-disposed is announced. Grocers 
and other tradesmen wrap their goods in the proscribed newspapers 
of the Royous, Durosoys, &c, which are thus spread broadcast 
among the people. 

Since the proposal of citizen Desmoulins to inquire into the 
grounds of arrest, quiet has been restored in several quarters. 
Wives and mothers are waiting from day to day for the execution 
of it, and terror and alarm no longer prevail among them. " My 
husband," said a citoyenne, " is not a great politician ; he is a man 
who has always been quiet, but because he does not shout in 
his section he has been taken for a moderate and imprisoned." 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 207 

There is talk against deputies who, instead of attending the 
Convention, amuse themselves by writing in newspapers. There 
was talk in a cafe in the Jardin de l'Egalite of Leonard Bourdon, 
and it was said that the Cr'eole newspaper took up his whole 
time. " Should the nation," asked a citizen, " pay representatives 
who neglect the mission entrusted to them by the people ? " 

Beraud. 

Women in groups proposed resolutions and denounced true 
patriots. The people silenced them, bidding them attend to 
their households, and telling them it was not their business to 
propose motions, especially against true republicans. 1 People say 
it has been noticed that women often become sanguinary, that 
they preach nothing but blood, that there are more and more a 
certain number of women who are constantly at the guillotine or 
the Revolutionary Tribunal, and that most of these women denounce 
and declaim against true patriots. They may, it is remarked, be 
excused, seeing it is from ignorance that they talk thus, but they 
should be enjoined to be silent, for amongst them there are 
some who are very obstinate and dangerous, as every day they 
slip into the groups. Pourvoyeur. 

7 Pluvidse. 
A piece entitled la Folie de Georges has had all the success which 
it deserved, in spite of some slight blemishes. It is vexatious, 
for instance, that the author makes the English despot form the 
project, in a fit of madness, of turning Jacobin. The ill-disposed 
much applauded this trait. Latour-Lamontagne. 

The popular society of the Piques section sent to-day to the 
army of the North three cavaliers, armed, equipped, and mounted, 
who are to be incorporated into the 10th regiment. The society 
had appointed twenty-four members to escort the brave defenders 
of the country. More than sixty persons, men and women, went 
with them to la Villette [a suburb of Paris]. There a truly fraternal 
dinner was held. Patriotic songs, sung by young citoyennes and 
repeated by the citizens, stimulated the love of liberty and equality. 
. . . This dinner is calculated to make MM. Pitt and Coburg 
tremble with fear. Bacon. 

1 On the 29 Niv6se a woman in the gallery of the Jacobin club complained 
that her repeated denunciations of an "aristocrat" had been ineffectual. — 
Moniteur, xix. 255. 



208 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Thieves are daily arrested. Yesterday a company of these 
gentry {messieurs) were caught in stealing hams from a pork- 
butcher's shop. The streets of Paris swarm with these scoundrels. 

Rolin. 

8 Phividse. 
This evening, at the cafe Payen, a long discussion arose on the 

decree requisitioning all who have served as officers on merchant 
vessels. 1 Latour-Lamontagne. 

At the cafe de la Montagne a letter from Bruges was read. It 
states that the Austrians, English, and Hanoverians quarrel, that 
there are every day fights between individual officers and soldiers of 
these different nations, and that they loudly express their discontent 
at the prolongation of the war. Dugasse. 

Yesterday 2 the market-women of Quinze-Vingts section replied 
to the citizens and citoyennes who complained of the market not 
being supplied as usual : " Is not to-day Sunday ? Why, where can 
you come from ? " and on their neighbours remarking that such talk 
ran risk of the guillotine, the rejoinder was, " Let them do what 
they like to me, I shall never forget Sundays." 

Le Harivel. 

9 Pluviose. 
At the second tribunal there was General Marasse [Marce], who 

defended himself with much force, but with a hypocritical air. 
Everybody said, " He will certainly go to the petite fenetre nationale 
[the guillotine], for he is said to have betrayed our armies, and he 
well deserves it." 3 . . . The majority of the citizens agreed in 
unanimously {sic) saying that the tribunals act well, that they acquit 
the innocent and punish the guilty, although murmurs are heard 
among the public at their judgments. 

Latour-Lamontagne. 

1 The account of the discussion is too long for quotation. One speaker, be- 
lieving that the decree betokened the invasion of England, represented that country 
to be on the brink of an insurrection, as the English were only waiting for the 
French to hail them as liberators. But another speaker, who, fleeing from 
persecution, spent some time in London in 1786 (? Morande), argued that the 
French were hated in England, and that an invasion would merely strengthen the 
Government. 

2 Sunday, 28th January. 

3 He was guillotined 9 Pluviose. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 209 

Two potent reasons should induce the National Convention to 
require all house-owners to remove the lead pipes projecting from 
their houses. 1 The first is the necessity of having lead to present to 
our enemies, and the second is that they inundate passers-by for 
two hours after rain has ceased. Rolin. 

10 Pluvidse. 
Decadi has been well observed by all the citizens keeping shops. 

The grocers have strictly obeyed the decree of the Commune which 
enjoins them to open their shops. Freron. 

I remarked that no artisan was at work to-day, that they were 
all enditnanches^ and that this Decadi was as sacred for them as 
Sunday is for the English. . . . Bacon. 

Decadi always draws many people to the theatres. Nearly all 
the shops are open in the daytime, and in the evening people go 
and applaud patriotic pieces. . . . An invasion of England is 
generally desired. 

There are no more complaints against the bakers, but many 
against the butchers and wine-shops. . . . Many well-dressed beggars 
go into the cafes, and after asking alms in a whisper they sit round 
the fire and join in political discussions. . . . 

No traces, so to speak, of Catholic worship remain in Paris. 

Dugasse. 

The early invasion of England is strongly desired by all Parisians. 
" Let us go to England. The only way is to go and exterminate 
them in their own homes." Charmont. 

11 Phividse. 
The butchers now close between ten and eleven in the morning 

at latest, saying that they have no more meat and cannot procure 
any. I hear many citizens say, " Are we going to have the same 
bother with meat that we have had with bread ? " 

There was a wedding yesterday in the chapelle of St. Andre des 
Arts, and it was sacramental. Many citizens were present as at a 
rare and curious thing. Mass continues to be said in this chapel 
every Sunday. Rolin. 

1 See p. 129. 

2 Although Dimanche was abolished, Bacon had to employ this term to 
signify the wearing of best clothes. 

O 



210 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The aristocrats were radiant to-day. They spread it about that 
King George and Pitt had been drawn in triumph at the opening of 
the English Parliament, and that George had declared that Russia 
and the Grand Turk had leagued with him against France, engaging 
to furnish contingents. They said that the English people liked the 
war, that hatred of the French was at a climax, that the decree 
against the English living in France had incensed them, and that the 
British brethren were going to fight us to the knife. The ill-disposed 
added that the arrest of Thomas Paine infallibly embroiled us with 
the Americans, that great man having framed their constitution. 

Dugasse. 

12 PIuvi$se. 
People have for a long time been remarking, but particularly 
to-day, that children, at least under five or six years old, should not 
be allowed to enter the Revolutionary Tribunal, for they make much 
noise by crying during the trials. Vendors of apples, brandy, and 
rolls {petits pains) should also be prohibited, for they pester citizens 
and interrupt the judges. When these saleswomen are in court you 
cannot hear the depositions of the witnesses, they make so much 
noise. ... If the people are glad to see the guilty punished they 
are still more glad to see the innocent acquitted, for I have noticed 
that whenever citizens are acquitted by the tribunal people weep 
for joy, men as well as women. Pourvoyeur. 

There are still old men begging in the streets, which makes good 
republicans sigh at their not being cared for. Dugasse. 

A child remarked to its mother that formerly school was very 
monotonous from having to kneel and repeat prayers which children 
did not comprehend, but now it was lively with singing patriotic 
hymns. Thus the child already sees the difference between the old 
and the new regime. The durability of the republic is ensured. 

Charmont. 

This morning and all day many people collected in the rue St. 
Louis St. Honore to see the window from which Vemerange threw 
himself down last night, and the pavement on which he fell. It 
was said that having been discovered in a house in that little street 
where he was concealed, and having heard the armed force at the 
door, he wrapped himself in one of the sheets of his bed and threw 
himself from the fourth story into the street. Not being quite dead, 
he was taken to the hospital. Dugasse. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 211 

A pretended banker saw his name placarded, and expected to be 
arrested. Hearing a knock at his door, he broke a large square of 
glass and threw himself into the street. He died shortly afterwards. 
After hearing some observations, one man said, " As well be dead as 
go to prison, for you will see that the prison massacres ordered by 
Petion will be repeated," and this probably terrifies the prisoners. 

Letasseye. 

14 Pluvidse. 
Apropos of the rue St. Louis, I should remark that people have 
long been grumbling at the slowness of the civic baptism of streets 
which recall the odious images of tyranny and superstition. 

Latour-Lamontagne. 

It was noticed to-day that a vestige of the old Sunday was 
observed. The theatres were more crowded, and the women more 
dressed. Dugasse. 

Mass was celebrated this [Sunday] morning in the Assumption 
church. A large number of persons were present, but at the end of 
the ceremony it is alleged that three or four Jacobins in red caps, 
posted at the church door with a register, demanded the names 
and addresses of all present before allowing them to leave. This 
measure, which is denounced as illegal and vexatious, disquiets 
many people. Latour-Lamontagne. 

People in different groups said, " So we are not free. Liberty 
of worship has been decreed, and you see how we are treated." x 

Jarousseau. 

16 Pluvidse. 
The decree on the liberty of men of colour has evoked the 

warmest enthusiasm. ... It is regarded as the death-warrant of all 
tyrants. Latour-Lamontagne. 

17 Pluvidse. 
The decree on the enfranchisement of the negroes was discussed 

in a cafe near the Italian Comedy. It was said that both the mulat- 
toes and the whites now in the colonies would consequently be 
massacred. Near Nicolet's, working-class women spoke of negresses. 
They said, " What nice black sisters are given us, but we can never 
associate with such women." Bacon. 

1 It appears from another report that the priest was alleged to have prayed for 
" the King," the imprisoned Dauphin. 



212 PARIS IN 1789-94 

People were glad to see the countess [marchioness] de Marboeuf 
and her worthy partner [steward] condemned by the Revolutionary 
Tribunal. "The guillotine," they said, "is too mild for them." 1 

Pourvoyeur. 

It seems that wedding dinners, which are very numerous, should 
be temporarily prohibited, for a large quantity of meat is thus con- 
sumed, and everybody knows how dear and difficult to procure it is. 
Those who give these feasts are not sans-culottes, but persons 
favoured by fortune. Rolin. 

18 PluviSse. 
Beggars, to excite pity and obtain more alms, go about the streets 

with three or four infants hanging at their necks, most of whom do 
not belong to them, but are kidnapped. Four female wretches 
accused of this horrible crime were taken to-day to the Mountain 
section. Latour-Lamontagne. 

The decree of the Commune forbidding masters, fathers, and 
mothers to inflict corporal punishment is thought strange. This 
makes children naughty, and go all lengths in audacity and vice. 

Rolin. 

19 Pluviose. 
The political horizon seems to be daily darkening through the 

perfidious manoeuvres of the enemies of the people, those vile agents 
of Pitt who concoct and propagate news of ever greater and greater 
disasters, flattering themselves that they will discourage the people, 
mislead them, and incite them to movements subversive of the just 
laws which protect liberty. . . . 

On all sides are heard complaints of the revolutionary com- 
mittees, which are accused of tyranny and embezzlement. There 
are also murmurs against the popular societies, which are suspected 
of leaning to federalism, and the dissolution of which, already 
advocated by a strong resolution of the Jacobins, seems to be 
generally desired. Latour-Lamontagne. 

At the great Revolutionary Tribunal the ci-devant count and 
marquis St. Maurice, his wife and mother-in-law, the ci-devant 
marquis de Carignan, and his brother were subjected to the 

1 She had sown her fields with lucerne instead of wheat, for a change of 
crops. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 213 

purging vote. 1 . . . The spectators said there could be no jealousy 
among them ; all had to pass by the little window [guillotine]. 

Letasseye. 

21 Pluviose. 

There is much complaint of a kind of decoration worn by 
citizens who are members of fraternal societies. To-day it is 
asserted that several have been seen in the streets with three 
or four medals fastened to their coats by red, blue, or white ribbon, 
and others with all three colours. This makes them a distinct 
class, and eventually may cause some trouble, for it often happens 
that a society expels some of its members and they refuse to discon- 
tinue wearing the medals. There will necessarily be a commotion. 

There is a complaint that certain Paris sections smash and 
carry off the woodwork, organs, and other objects belonging to 
the ci-devant church of the 3rd arrondissement. It is asserted 
that masterpieces both in wood and iron have been torn to pieces. 

Rolin. 

People say there is to be an invasion of England this spring, 
but they well remark that there is no need of this, for there will 
be a revolution there before then. George and his minister 
Pitt will have their heads cut off, as also some lords. 

Pourvoyeur. 

I attended the popular society at Vaugirard [then a subur- 
ban village], and here is what passed. There were many people, 
and the number of women in the galleries was considerable. 
Hay and oats and the means of keeping cattle were discussed. 
Everybody was anxious to give his opinion, and the society came 
to very wise resolutions. Catechisms for children were next read. 
The secretary and president exhorted the women who had children 
to make them learn by heart the Declaration of Rights. (Applauded.) 
A little work by citizen Bellavoine, ex-monk and clerk to the 
municipality, 2 was also read. This little work dwelt on fanaticism, 
and the crimes and wickedness of priests. The author made you 
strongly feel how the people have been deceived by so many 
do-nothings, who, he said, quaffed the pure blood coursing in 
their veins while putting them to sleep with oremus's. This phrase 
was much applauded and made the citoyennes laugh much. 

Bacon. 

1 For corresponding with Emigres. 

2 Probably the priest of Vaugirard who had figured in Gobel's procession to 
the Convention, November 7, 1793. 



214 PARIS IN 1789-94 

It is incredible how many citizens went to-day [Sunday] to 
the Enfant Jesus, barriere d'Enfer, to hear mass. This begins 
to disquiet many friends of tranquillity, especially the parade with 
which these citizens went to make their devotions. 

Charmont. 

The prisoners of St. Lazare, faubourg St. Denis, tried to revolt. 1 
The guard had to be doubled to put them down. This was because 
the ill-disposed had spread a rumour that the Convention was 
going to release a large number elsewhere, and they said: "We 
are left to perish here ; we are not interrogated ; the ci-devants have 
the preference." These expressions disturb people's minds, and are 
circulated in many cafes. 

23 Pluvidse. 

A citizen passed to-day under the arcades of Palais Egalite, 
and seeing busts of Marat and Lepelletier 2 at the door of a citoyenne 
who sells them, he asked what they were. The citoyenne replied 
that he must know. He instantly tried to smash them, but several 
citizens being there seized him by the collar and took him to the 
police-station. Mercier. 

Surprise is excited at seeing citizen Delaunay, a member of the 
Commune, buried on the boulevard. " When there is a cemetery," 
people say, " why are not the burials there ? Was he an extraordinary 
man that he should have a distinctive place ? If all members of 
popular societies who die are buried on the highways, the boulevards 
will soon be covered with tombs." The grave, moreover, is not 
deep enough, and it is to be feared that a fetid odour will exhale. 

Beraud. 

24 Pluvidse. 
Mendicity is daily fearfully on the increase in the streets of Paris. 

They are mostly crowded with children, women, and old men. 

Dugasse. 

Republicans still look askance on the black plumes adorning the 
Henry IV. caps of the magistrates of the people, the organs of 
justice. " Sans-culotte judges," some citizens remarked, "ought 
to sit only in pantaloons and red caps. The costume of liberty 
should be the first object to strike the eye of the dastards who have 
betrayed it." Latour-Lamontagne. 

1 This is contradicted by another observer. 

2 Assassinated for voting for the death of Louis XVI. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 215 

At porte St. Antoine there was a scuffle for milk. The milk- 
woman, by way of consolation, said the cows were being killed for 
want of fodder. Bacon. 

25 Pluvi6se. 
"Why," it was asked in a group in the rue St. Honore as a 
condemned man went to execution, "why refuse to those con- 
demned to death the succour of the religion which they profess? 
There is no law against liberty of worship, and in the very centre 
of Paris mass is daily celebrated. The people scout dogmas, and 
that is enough; should we be more rigorous towards those who 
have only a few minutes to live? " "You are quite right," replied 
a citizen to the man who had thus spoken, " and if I were a legis- 
lator I should let the Catholic have his priest in these last moments, 
the Jew his rabbi, &c, so that in preparing for this fatal journey 
everybody should at least have the liberty of packing up (/aire son 
paquet) as he chose." Latour-Lamontagne. 

The streets are still disgracefully dirty. The public promenades 
are full of filth, and if they are still left neglected they will become 
a poisonous surface which would have to be shunned. 

Dugasse. 

26 PluviSse. 
"When will the guillotine end?" was asked in a small group in 
the Place de la Revolution this afternoon. 1 "It is not tired of 
guillotining at least two a day." It was surprising, people remarked, 
to what a degree women have become ferocious. They assemble 
every day at the executions. Pourvoyeur. 

28 PluviSse. 
It is especially at the theatres we notice that many citoyennes still 
observe the former Sunday. To-day they were crowded, and more 
women than men. Their dress showed, moreover, that they were 
en cer'emonie. 

The scarcity to-day has been extreme, especially in vegetables, 
the diet of the poor. The dismay was so great that I saw several 
persons shed tears, exclaiming, " What is to become of us ? If this 
goes on we shall be starved to death." 

1 Three persons were executed that day. 



216 PARIS IN 1789-94 

30 PluviSse. 

Many citizens walking in the boulevard du Temple, perceiving 
the grave of Delaunay, drew back with horror, and promised to 
speak of it at their sections. The women left that side of the pro- 
menade and went on the other. 

Children having planted a tree of liberty at the crossways in 
front of the rue faubourg du Temple, where there was formerly a 
crucifix, several ill-disposed men, disguised as artisans, went to 
remove it ; but these children, perceiving this, vigorously objected, 
and went with tears in their eyes to the general assembly of the 
Temple section to ask for the support of the citizens, and the latter 
are to take turns in watching over this valuable tree. Beraud. 

It is asserted that the prisoners at Petite Force are in wretched 
plight, that they have nothing to lie upon, and that they lack neces- 
saries, while the rich are in the houses of detention as if in their 
own palaces, and are treated as ci-devants. This seems to make 
much sensation among the public. Rolin. 

A man entered the house of citizen de Buffon, 1 rue de Matignon 
No. 9, Champs-Elysees section, in order, as he told him, to arrest 
him. Citizen de Buffon asked for his authority. The man replied 
that this was needless, and that if he would give him money he could 
arrange the affair. Thereupon he [Buffon] shut the door and had 
him arrested and taken to the section. 2 Freron. 

Nearly all the grocers closed to-day, in spite -of the injunction of 
the Commune to keep open. It was pitiable in several quarters, 
where the people could not procure the few provisions of daily use. 
There was much grumbling at the remissness of the authorities in 
not enforcing the laws favourable to the masses. All the theatres 
to-day were crammed. It provoked indignation to see so many 
citizens occupied with frivolous plays and songs while our brave 

1 The naturalist's son. It is curious to see this mixture of Jacobin and aristo- 
cratic appellations. 

2 But the man had a confederate who at once retaliated by denouncing Buffon, 
and the latter was a few hours later arrested. He sent Fouquier Tinville a full 
explanation, urging, moreover, that he had not seen his first wife, " the infamous 
mistress of Orleans," for eight years, and had divorced her as soon as divorces 
were instituted, marrying again eight months ago. Fouquier made a note in the 
margin of the letter that an inquiry into Buffon's statements should be made, but 
this he apparently forgot, and Buffon was guillotined on the 10th July 1794 for 
the pretended Luxembourg prison plot. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 217 

brothers are shedding their blood for liberty. " Why," people said, 
" are theatres open on Decadi ? Is it not like inviting us to desert 
the meetings where the interests of the nation are discussed? 
Decadis are holy days, when the people should be solely occupied 
with the welfare of the republic." These reflections were much 
applauded. Latour-Lamontagne. 

The boulevards, promenades, and theatres presented the aspect 
of a happy and contented people, despite all the mischief that 
enemies outside and inside are trying to work. 1 Dugasse. 

In the morning there was a ceremony at the Chalier section for 
the unveiling of the bust of Chalier, 2 the new pattern, and all, with a 
discourse suited to the ceremony, was much applauded. Never had 
there been so many people at a festival. Reason dominates, and has 
gained ascendancy over the hearts of Frenchmen. 

I VentSse (igtk February 1794). 
Two citizens, being in the cafe at the corner of the rue des Bons 
Enfants and the rue St. Honored began singing a patriotic song. 
The landlord, who is an aristocrat [reactionary], said they should 
not sing on his premises. The citizens said to him, " But what we 
sing is patriotic." " No matter, you shall not sing in my house." 
This angered the citizens, and from words they came to blows, but 
other citizens parted them. The two citizens, on leaving, said to the 
aristocrat, "Thou deservest to be denounced." Monier. 

Near the Jardin des Plantes a numerous group were discussing 
Robespierre's illness^ They seemed much concerned, and said that 
if Robespierre died all was lost. "He alone," said a woman, 
" baffles all the schemes of the wretches. God alone can guarantee 
the life of that incorruptible patriot." All heaved a deep sigh. I 
noticed that when the sans-culottes talked of Robespierre's indis- 
position well-dressed men did not utter a word, but an air of satis- 
faction was perceptible on their countenances. Bacon. 

Artisans complain that they can no longer go to wine-shops for 
their meals. The landlords daily raise their prices. Some days 
ago they could dine for 10 sous, but now they have to give 15, 
bread included. Freron. 

1 But another observer, after speaking of the merry throng all along the boule- 
vards, says, " Many citizens state that for some days they have not tasted meat, 
vegetables being their only food." 

2 A Lyons patriot, guillotined 16th July 1793. 



218 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The other day, in the rue de la Montagne St. Genevieve, nearly 
all occupied by butchers, a woman among a crowd which besieged 
the stall went to one of them. When her turn came to be served, 
she asked for what meat she wanted, and reckoning up the amount 
according to the maximum, she handed the sum to the butcher, 
asking him whether it was right. "No," said the man. "Well," 
replied the woman, "if it is not your reckoning it is that of the law." 
Thereupon she went off, spite of the outcry of the butcher, who was 
forced to put up with it. This proves that the numerous flagrant 
violations of the maximum law arise much more from the weakness 
of buyers than from the roguery and audacity of sellers, and that in 
the eyes of the law one is not more culpable than the other, men 
being unfortunately like sheep, and not rising to the sentiment of 
their rights and interests except by example. The crowd in this 
case, witnessing the firmness and especially the success of our 
heroine, insisted on having meat at the same price. The butcher 
resisted, there was an uproar, the guard was sent for, and my man 
was taken off to prison. Perriere. 

The boys called enfants de la patrie [foundlings] are inconceiv- 
ably corrupted. Yesterday in the national Jardin des Plantes, they 
set off singing the most obscene songs, which made the people 
murmur. Their teacher showed no shame. Citizens attribute this 
to citizen Chaumette, for procuring the abolition of corporal punish- 
ment. Mercier. 

Robespierre was reported to-day to be worse. This news much 
affected the true friends of the country. It was stated at the same 

time that Couthon was better. 

2 Ventdse. 

One is indignant at hearing everywhere cried with a kind of 
affectation the list of the guillotined. Anti-revolutionary intentions 
cannot but be attributed to those who publish this work. There is 
no middle course. Either it is a list of proscription and infamy for 
the families of the condemned, or it is an attempt to render the 
tribunal odious to all France, and this is the more probable 
inasmuch as if the publisher had patriotic intentions he would not 
have failed to append the more numerous and more consoling list 
of those acquitted by the tribunal. There is a cry on all hands for 
the suppression of this pamphlet. People even wish the author to 
be prosecuted, unless well-known patriotism demonstrated his good 
intentions. Latour-Lamontagne. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 219 

It is whispered about everywhere that Robespierre was poisoned, 
but the antidotes administered make us hope we shall soon see him 
reappear still more radiant with glory. Beraud. 

Near the Commune [Hotel de Ville] there was much talk of the 
notary who killed himself in the rue de l'Egalite. One said, " It 
would not be amiss if all notaries did the same, for there is not one 
who is really a patriot." " That is true," people remarked. 

Bacon. 

I entered one of the most frequented cafes of the maison 
Egalite [Palais Royal]. I tried to ascertain the cause of [the 
taciturnity] which I had seen. The few persons whom I found 
inclined to talk were, like me, ignorant of it. Others had the air of 
avoiding any question as a trap. Nearly all talked of trivial matters, 
as though there was no fatherland, and passed the time in frivolous 
games. This silence is vexatious. It can arise only from two 
causes — either from the aristocracy, who know that their talk would 
not be allowed, or from the timidity and distrust of patriots, who 
are generally outspoken, lest some malicious person should profit 
by any unguarded expression to accuse them and represent them as 
guilty in spite of their innocence. Perriere. 

It was rumoured that Robespierre was better, and even went out 
to-day. . . . There is the same throng at the butchers' doors from 
six in the morning as there was at the bakers' at the time of the 
difficulty of procuring bread. Dugasse. 

Crowds no longer collect at the bakers' doors, but at the 
butchers', pork-butchers', and the tobacco warehouse, formerly hotel 
Longueville. A large crowd of citizens daily flock the streets. In 
the rue du Rohan in particular the citizens were ranged four abreast 
from the pork-butcher's door nearly up to the rue Nicaise. " How 
is it," citizens said, " that to get a quarter or half a pound of bacon 
we must spend nearly the whole day at a shop door ? " " There is 
certainly,'' replied another, " malice against us." Two guards were 
stationed at the door to keep the multitude in order. 

Charmasse. 

At the Gardes Franchises section two doctors stated that they 
had many patients who had no broth, being unable to procure meat, 
though they had special tickets, and that several lying-in women 
were in the same case. Another citizen said that good citizens 



220 PARIS IN 1789-94 

lacked everything, while the ill-disposed lacked nothing, for that 
morning at the door of his house there were at least twelve pounds 
of raw meat thrown out and spoiled. Monier. 

In a cafe in the rue St. Denis there was talk of the arrests. A 
citizen said, " In the last few days the revolutionary committee of 
the Lombards section has arrested at least fifty persons whose 
patriotism and probity are acknowledged. That committee seems 
bent on locking up all heads of households, in order to make the 
Commune fall by a rising among those dependent on the shop- 
keepers." Beraud. 

3 Ventdse. 
Four men employed in taking away the coffins from the churches 
relate that bodies have been taken up and not carried to the 
cemeteries. The commissaries appointed for that purpose would 
not allow it. These men said that jewels had certainly been found, 
and that the persons buried there were very rich, for there were 
large silver plates on the coffins, with inscriptions. 

Freron. 

It was stated that Chaudot's wife, in despair since her husband's 
execution, had thrown herself from the window, and that she was 
enceinte. People did not fail to add on this point the tragical story 
of Auriol's wife, at Lyons, who threw herself into the Rhone with 
her two children in like circumstances. Dugasse. 

Cafe de Foix. This cafe, so much frequented and so abound- 
ing in politicians, was full to-day, like all public places, with the 
apathetic or the deaf and dumb, afraid of listening or speaking. 
Yesterday the newspaper was read out, which, like the sermons of 
famous preachers, drew a crowd of hearers so large that the queue 
extended nearly up to the wine-shop. After the reading, which 
thereby became still more like a sermon, dead silence, or conversations 
in a whisper on other things, games, and drinks. Perriere. 

The Contrat Social section by wise forethought, feeling the 
desirability of providing for the subsistence of women bearing 
subjects to the republic, has just established a hospital where preg- 
nant women will go and will find the broth and meat necessary 
in such circumstances. This has excited the emulation of the 
other sections, and several already propose to imitate it. 

Hanriot. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 221 

4 Vent$se. 
The popular assembly of the Rights of Man section was very 

numerously attended. Robespierre's speech, or rather his report on 
behalf of the Public Safety Committee, was read. This occupied 
an hour and a t half, because at every paragraph the reader was 
applauded. . . . Indivisibilite section has sent a deputation to the 
popular societies to inform them that at the hotel [prison] de la 
Force there were underground passages by which live oxen, calves, 
and sheep were smuggled in. This gross abuse will be reported to 
the Convention. Bacon. 

The appearance of Paris begins to become alarming. In the 
markets and streets you meet a large crowd of citizens running, 
dashing against each other, shouting, weeping, everywhere presenting 
the image of despair. Seeing all this you would imagine Paris to 
be already a prey to the horrors of famine. But what is very 
consoling for the patriot and very creditable to the republican 
populace is to see this mass of citizens amidst their great dis- 
quietudes submissive to the laws, and respecting the property even 
of those whom they most suspect of trying to starve them. 

Latour-Lamontagne. 

Two citizens in different quarters state that they have found 
glass in the bread. • . . Many girls of ten or twelve or even 
younger prostitute themselves with boys of the same age. Yester- 
day the palace Egalite was full of them. It is even alleged that 
mothers give up their daughters to libertines for money. 

Rolin. 

Several citizens said it would be very advisable to have all 
pleasure gardens cultivated, and force the owners to sow or plant 
the necessaries of life, instead of having shrubberies and English 
gardens. It is surprising what a quantity of vegetables and other 
things might be produced if such a scheme were carried out. 

Freron. 

A caricature appears showing Pitt, whip in hand, driving all the 
kings of Europe. The Pope is behind him, and whips him in his 
turn. Dugasse. 

5 VentSse. 
This morning the faubourg St. Antoine occupied the Vincennes 

road and pillaged all that was being brought to Paris. Some paid, 



222 PARIS IN 1789-94 

others carried off things without paying. The peasants in dismay 
will bring nothing more to Paris. 1 Siret. 

Bitter complaints, already expressed numberless times, wer 
repeated to-day of the arrest and imprisonment of citizens who 
are good patriots and are victims of ambition, cupidity, jealousy, 
and in short every human passion. Rolin. 

6 Ventdse. 
At half-past four yesterday, passing the Place de la Revolution, 
I was struck by the spectacle of seventeen conspirators condemned 
to death — four women, who were first despatched, 2 and then 
thirteen men. The first was an old man of eighty. Feebleness 
and age did not allow him to mount the steps, and he had to be 
carried up to the scaffold. Humanity in other circumstances would 
have elicited pity and commiseration, but national vengeance taking 
the place of pity, there were only cries, when his head fell, of 
" Bravo ! " " Vive la republique ! " Hanriot. 

Seventeen criminals were this evening taken to the scaffold, 
among whom was particularly noticed an old man, nearly ninety 
[Schmitt], and so feeble that it is said he had to be carried to the 
scaffold. The people seemed much touched by the spectacle. 
" What crime," said several, " could a man in that state of decrepi- 
tude have committed ? Why does not old age, which is so much 
like childhood, partake all its privileges?" This feeling appeared 
to be general. 3 Indignation was expressed at the kind of brutality 
with which the executioner fulfils his duties. He seized several of 
these criminals, it is said, with a roughness which revolted many of 
the spectators. Latour-Lamontagne. 

8 Ventdse. 
There is much complaint of the prodigious number of cripples 
of all kinds who parade their infirmities in the streets and public 
squares* Several of them have maladies and wounds calculated 
to produce very bad effects on pregnant women. Rolin. 

1 Other observers speak of similar scenes, and one suggests that the suburban 
market-gardeners should give notice of their arrival, so that an escort might meet 
and protect them. 

2 Two of them were sisters, governesses at Orleans, who had sheltered two 
priests ; the octogenarian was Guillaume Schmitt, of Sarrelouis, accused of send- 
ing money to emigres. 

3 Latour was not apparently a spectator, but his report, seemingly contradict- 
ing Hanriot's, may have been correct as to a portion of the crowd. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 223 

1 1 Vent6se. 
In consequence of what I was told I have been to Villette. 

Here is a great abuse which I denounce, and which is one of the 
reasons why the people lack everything. Would you believe it? 
Well, the market-women go to Villette, feast scandalously, meet 
the market-gardeners, with whom they make a compact, drink to 
excess, and devise their schemes. The provisions which these 
women buy they wrap in small bundles, and have children with 
them who carry them, but taking different routes, and these bundles 
are for rich people and restaurant-keepers. This traffic is terrible 
for friends of liberty. Beraud. 

Yesterday, on the Place de la Revolution, a somewhat consider- 
able group of men and women expressed pity for the two persons 
going to the guillotine. Hanriot. 

12 Vent6se. 
This afternoon, on the Place de la Revolution, during the 

guillotining 1 a citoyenne said " Quelle horreur I " Several citizens 
took her to task. "Do you mean that you are sorry to see 
conspirators punished ? " " No," she said, " I meant that it was 
surprising that when guillotining goes on like this the rest do 
not learn a lesson from it." On seeing peasants on the scaffold, 
people said, "What, have these wretches allowed themselves to 
be corrupted? If they were nobles or rich it would not be 
strange their being counter-revolutionists, but in that class we 
should expect all to be patriots." "The law is just," people 
remarked, " it strikes rich and poor indiscriminately." The ver- 
dicts of the Revolutionary Tribunal are always applauded. 

Pourvoyeur. 

13 Ventdse. 
The popular assembly of section Bon Conseil continued the 

purge of members of the society. ... A tobacconist, aged 68, 
who has always performed his patrol duty, was excluded for 
having called the president monsieur and for having spoken at the 
tribune bareheaded. Members alleged that he must be a moderate. 

Bacon. 

14 Ventdse. 
Every day women are injured [in the queues]. Yesterday 

especially many had to be taken home seriously injured. To-day 

1 Fourteen victims. 



224 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the crowd at the butchers' doors began at 2 a.m. A member of 
the revolutionary committee of section Cite tried to disperse the 
crowd, but he was near being strangled by the women, who 
indulged in very anti-civic talk against the Revolution. 

Charmont. 

The Champs-Elyse'es are still infested with rogues, thieves, and 
assassins. The wine-shops at the entrance near the Place de la 
Revolution are their lairs. It is high time to destroy these lairs, 
as well as all the games and other stupidities near the Pont Tour- 
nant which serve to amuse them. Freron. 

In a group it was argued that all useless dogs, that is to say 
those kept for pleasure, should be killed. It was remarked that 
assuming only 50,000 dogs in Paris, and that they consume a quarter 
of a pound of bread a day, this makes 2500 loaves. . . . Several 
persons applauded this calculation, and it was the general opinion 
that only butchers' dogs, and some others of necessary utility, should 
be preserved. Beraud. 

The masons and carpenters will no longer work at the old 
wages. Every decade they demand an increase of ten sous. So 
also with the labourers in these two classes. They are now being 
paid ten sous a day. If any demur is made to their immoderate 
demands they threaten to strike. Returning home at nine yester- 
day evening, I heard seven or eight workmen at a street corner 
agreeing among themselves not to go back to work. This resolution 
was probably due to their masters' refusal to raise their wages. 
There is an outcry on all sides against this tyranny of the work- 
men. It is hoped and expected that in the new maximum their 
wages will be regulated, for the maximum, it is urged, is illusory if 
manual labour, which is merchandise like any other, and is the 
necessary basis of the price of all other articles, is not included and 
reduced to a proportionate rate. 

Artisans come punctually [to the popular assemblies] to get 
their attendance registered and obtain their forty sous, and then 
go out and drink nearly all the time of the discussion which might 
enlighten them, not returning till the time for getting back their 
cards and receiving their pay. Perriere. 

15 Ventdse. 

A cart loaded with beans arriving at a grocer's door in the rue 
de Bretagne, section Temple, a considerable crowd of citoyennes and 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 225 

men doubtless ill-disposed rushed on these vegetables with such 
avidity that the guard was driven off and disarmed, and all was 
pillaged. But few persons paid for what they took. Beraud. 

At the section la Montagne there arrived a deputation from section 
Sans-culottes. Its object was the education so much desired by all 
good citizens. It wishes for primary schools to be opened as soon 
as possible throughout France, only one school in each parish and 
all the children to be dressed alike. They should be taught to 
pronounce no words of which they did not know the meaning, 
pictures should be placed before them to give them an idea of each 
object, example should always precede precept, and physical and 
moral qualities should be developed by gymnastic exercises. 

Hanriot. 

16 VentSse. 

A citizen whom I accosted while a man 1 was being taken to 
execution said to me that the guillotine was not yet ready to rest, 
but awaited 20,000 more. "What!" said I, rather surprised, "in 
Paris alone?" "Oh, no," he replied, rather disconcerted, "all over 
France." Beraud. 

1 7 VentSse. 
Several sections propose to petition the National Convention to 

forbid confectioners to make cakes as long as the scarcity lasts, as 
they require much butter and many eggs. 2 The perfumers also use 
many potatoes for pommades. It would be well to stop this. 



18 VentSse. 
On the boulevard, near the cafe de la Societe, several men and 
women were talking of priests. One said, " We are saved if we can 
get rid of priests." Another said, " I cannot understand why the 
Protestants still hold their preachings as formerly, for I lately entered 
the ci-devant church St. Louis and I noticed that the Protestant 
minister still spoke of Jesus Christ. I conclude that a Protestant 
priest and a Catholic priest are much alike. The Convention 
should drive them all out, so as to give no room for jealousy." All 
the small group said, "That is true; all priests are scoundrels." 

Bacon. 

1 Robin, tradesman at Troyes, aged 74, and of weak intellect. 

2 In a later report Bacon states that the confectioners' shops had nothing to 
sell, and that a citizen wishing for refreshments had consequently to go to a wine- 
shop at greater expense. 

P 



226 PARIS IN 1789-94 

21 Ventdse. 
Groups collected near the Revolutionary Tribunal, and citizens 
unanimously expressed surprise that the judges no longer sat in the 
evening. " The judges," it was remarked, "are tired, and must rest 
after dinner. What harm is there in that? The aristocrats who 
would have been condemned at night are guillotined a day later." 
"All very well," said an honest citizen, "but the innocent whom 
they would have acquitted are also a day later." " Bravo, you are 
quite right," rejoined the first speaker. Great publicity should be 
given to this anecdote, which reflects honour on mankind. 

BOUCHESEICHE. 

Much complaint is made of there being still citizens who are in 
the wine-shops from morning to night, and every day sing, eat, drink, 
and get drunk. At 9 yesterday morning a number of men so drunk 
as to be unable to stand were seen. About 10 I counted seven on 
my way. ... A number of people complain and proclaim loudly 
that they have not tasted meat for a fortnight, and that artisans 
have not strength for work. I testify that it is urgent to forbid 
aristocrats having several dishes at a meal, for there are still some 
who have three or four. Rolin. 

22 Ventdse. 
A citizen said he did not comprehend the Revolutionary 
Tribunal. The nun who had just lost her life 1 did not deserve to 
be guillotined, but at most to be transported. Several people 
asking whether he thought the judges capable of condemning any 
one who did not deserve it, he replied that he judged by the inter- 
rogatory which he had heard that morning. Thereupon he went off. 
I followed him to the boulevard du Temple, where he disappeared 
by a staircase. Mercier. 

"Seeing that tradesmen," said a citizen in a group near the 
Convention, " are forced to sell at the maximum provisions capable 
of adulteration, it is necessary to watch them, and from time to 
time test their goods, for it is to be presumed that a man buying 
brandy at 50 sous a pint, and forced by the maximum to sell at 36, 
will use every means of avoiding loss." Le Harivel. 

The scarcity of candles is increasingly felt. Numbers of citizens 
are without any, and are forced to stop work early. I went to 

1 Sophie Adelaide Leclerc-Glatigny, aged 27, for anti-civic talk. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 227 

several shops and could not get any. I asked a chandler the 
reason. He said it was very simple ; they were out of stock. 
" After losing 600 francs by the nation I have no longer any goods. 
I cannot even get meat to make broth for a sick member of my 
family." Hanriot. 

The people grumble a good deal against the civil commissaries 1 
who preside over the distribution of the necessaries of life. They 
are accused of getting served first and of favouring their acquaint- 
ances. Rolin. 

24 VentSse. 
Near the cafe Conti, rue de Thionville, a rather numerous group 
discussed Hebert's arrest. A man of about thirty, in national guard 
uniform, said, " So Pere Duchesne is arrested. This surprises many 
people, especially patriots. If this goes on, good-bye to liberty ; all is 
over." Then all dispersed without uttering a word. Bacon. 

Everywhere the arrests were approved, but as the nature of 
their conspiracy was not yet known they were honoured only with 
the title of intriguers. Dugasse. 

26 VentSse. 
The seven [fifteen] persons 2 condemned yesterday went to the 
scaffold singing, laughing, and dancing. The Vendee general and 
the chief clerk at the War Office were prominent by their liveliness. 

Perriere. 

The usual throng at the provision shops. The women seem to 
have made up their minds to sacrifice their mornings [in waiting 
outside]. Butter and eggs are coming in a little more every day, 
and there is a sensible increase. Clement. 

28 VentSse. 
In the rue Charenton, near the Quinze-Vingts hospital, five 
or six women were speaking of Pere Duchesne's arrest. I went up 
to them and found that one said, " I have just this moment learned 
in the faubourg Antoine that Robespierre is in prison." "What?" 
replied the other, " it is not possible ? " " Well," rejoined the first, 
" many say so. I have also seen a laundress in the rue du Bon 

1 Members of the civil committees of the sections. 

2 From Clamecy and Nevers, charged with Girondism. 



228 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Conseil who says the same." ... I went to Montmartre, and met 
at least ten persons who asked me whether it was true that Robes- 
pierre was arrested. I replied that I knew nothing of it, and that it 
should not be credited till the Convention announced it. 1 

Bacon. 

29 Ventdse. 

It is remarked that in spite of the law forbidding substitutes 
to mount guard, the guard service is always full of substitutes, 
which makes it very ill performed. Most of the defaulters are 
young men. This should no longer be allowed. The national 
guard duty should be well performed just now more than ever. 

Pourvoyeur. 

A grocer in the rue des Nonaindaines distributed salted butter 
to at least four or five hundred persons ranged in line. They them- 
selves kept order. 

30 Ventdse. 

We read on the door and walls of the Observatory : " National 
building to be sold." It must be by mistake that this inscription 
has been placed on a building erected at great cost by a despot's 
pride, but which a free and enlightened nation should devote to the 
progress of science. . . . Formerly we saw more women than men 
in churches, and so also in the temples of Reason there are few men 
and many women. Boucheseiche. 

2 Germinal. 
There was talk in the cafe de la Justice, in front of the Palace [of 
Justice] that it was the Hebert faction which had tried to indoctrinate 
the people with an idea of an invasion of England, and that if the 
Convention had had the misfortune to fall into the trap the republic 
would have been ruined. Charmont. 

The distrust of those who affect to wear, and even exaggerate, the 
pretended republican costume increases daily. . . . 

Yesterday the courts of the Palace and the adjoining streets 
were so crowded that it was impossible to approach. Many ex- 
pressed a desire to see the conspirators beheaded. It was remarked 
that of all the accused Hebert showed the most cowardice. 

Hanriot. 
1 No newspaper ventured to speak of this rumour. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 229 

In the Gardes Franchises society a citizen commissary for 
the distribution of meat denounced the butcher of the rue Fosses 
St. Germain Auxerrois as having cut up his meat at two in the 
morning. He heard him at work from his bed. The conduct 
of this butcher is reprehensible, because it was like an invitation 
to passers-by to collect outside, which did not fail to happen, 
for the commissary went at five and found a prodigious number 
of people, forming two queues. When the distribution commenced 
there was frightful disorder. Monier. 



The judges of the 2nd arrondissement, it is noticed with 
pleasure, have given up their monarchical costume, and have 
substituted the cap of liberty for the Henri IV. cap. It is hoped 
that the other tribunals, especially the Revolutionary Tribunal, 
will lose no time in following the example. 

Latour-Lamontagne. 



Some Parisians on marrying hold the festival in the neighbour- 
hood of these villages [Sceaux, &c], either for cheapness or to 
enjoy the pure country air. It would be well if all who make 
a feast followed this example. They should be required to do 
this as long as the scarcity of provisions lasts. 

Dugasse. 



Mendicity : public opinion pronounces more and more strongly 
against this stain on governments, especially a government like ours. 
. . . These sad objects now flood all the public squares, and have 
not even the merit of asking alms in republican fashion, for it is 
always in the name of objects of superstition that they appeal to 
humane citizens. Several of them, examined in the groups into 
which they had crept to solicit alms, have been found perfectly 
sound, without any of the sores or infirmities to which they pre- 
tended. It is even said that a mastiff worked a miracle in the 
person of one of these impostors who was being taken to a revolu- 
tionary committee, for the animal touching him behind, my man, 
who had been limping, began walking properly. ... I had for- 
gotten to add on this subject that people seem to fear these beggars 
are paid to go about and thus virtually cast a stigma on the govern- 
ment, and by their old fashion of asking alms keep up the signs of 
religious superstition. Perriere. 



230 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Drunkards have fearfully multiplied. You cannot walk four 
steps without meeting them. Most of them insult passers-by, 
especially such citizens as wear a carmagnole or a beaver hat. 



3 Germinal^ 
The public promenades and boulevards presented a throng of 
persons in their best clothes. It is a proof that fanaticism and 
superstition have still a prodigious number of partisans in Paris. 

4 Germinal. 
The procession [Hebert, Cloots, and sixteen others] seemed a 
festival rather than an execution. Most of them had a very tranquil 
air. Hebert was the most downcast. 2 Charmont. 

6 Germinal. 
It is now almost as difficult to get milk as meat. From four in 
the morning there were groups waiting at the spots where the milk- 
women are accustomed to stop. The milkwomen allege that it is 
difficult to get from the barriers to their destination. 3 Siret. 

8 Germinal. 
Two persons, one a Capucin monk [Peusselet], have been 
guillotined. Two or three women said they had come only because 
they thought it was Chabot who was to be despatched, but they 
would come again and see him when his turn came. 4 

Soulet. 

Mourning is in the heart. The sober spirit of the republic has 
banished all that is simply external. Those who feel what befits 
the republic would like to forbid the wearing of mourning. This 
custom, which adds nothing to real grief and often simulates it, is 
especially impolitic at a time when liberty can be founded only on 
the courage and devotedness of its defenders. Mourning makes 
you count up its victims. This gloomy aspect gives young men 
melancholy.; reflections, and warns fathers and mothers of the mis- 
fortunes awaiting them. Perriere. 

1 Sunday, 23rd March 1794. 

2 Other reports speak of an enormous crowd, of the general satisfaction of the 
spectators, and of many cases of pocket-picking. 

3 They were apparently interrupted by customers on the way. Wine, ac- 
cording to another report, was plentiful. 

4 He was guillotined on the 16th. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 231 

9 Germinal. 
Although a considerable number of gamblers were lately arrested 
at the hotel d'Angleterre and in some houses of the ci-devant Palais 
Royal garden, this does not prevent loto from being played every 
afternoon at No. 231. Monier. 

Women who went to the Commune to complain of their butcher 
having charged more than the maximum were arrested and im- 
prisoned for having bought at that price; but to-day's decree, 
punishing the butchers alone who do not obey the maximum law, 
has been welcomed with a kind of transport, and will doubtless 
entail the release of these women. This was the feeling of several 
citizens collected in various groups. 

"I have just been witness," said a citizen in the same cafe [de la 
Republique], " of an accident of daily occurrence, yet which it would 
be easy to prevent. A pregnant woman on seeing six persons on 
their way to execution fainted and fell, and it is feared that the fall 
may endanger her and her infant. Why," added this citizen, " is 
there not a fixed route from which the executioner cannot deviate, 
thus allowing those incapable of supporting the spectacle to avoid 
it ? " 1 This reflection was approved, and it was suggested that the 
procession should always go by the quays, where the traffic is 
usually less considerable. Latour-Lamontagne. 

Surprise is felt at the same persons daily filling the tribunals and 
the galleries of the Commune and clubs. Their appearance, people 
say, proves that they cannot remain so assiduously in these places 
without at least the hope of recompense, for what do they live 
upon 



?2 



10 Germinal. 
The revolutionary committees are every day falling into discredit. 
You daily hear that they consist of a number of intriguers, who 
plunder the nation and oppress citizens. It is a fact that there is no 
section in Paris which is not dissatisfied with its revolutionary com- 
mittee or does not sincerely desire to have them abolished. 



1 Perriere on the 17 and 18 Ventose had made the same suggestion, a girl 
having fainted on seeing the carts. 

2 It is evident that there was a paid claque. 



232 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Here, unfortunately, on the eve of the trial of Danton, 
end the reports of the observers. The municipality had 
also, as part of its police, a department of " surveillance de 
l'esprit public." It was in charge of La Sosse or L. Clement, 
who drew up a daily report, chiefly devoted to the food 
difficulty. I have found some of these reports, 1 but they 
are in general much more meagre than those of the 
observers. I give specimens which show that the food 
difficulty was still acute, that the victims of the guillotine 
excited no compassion, some of them indeed meeting death 
with derision, that Catholicism had not wholly disappeared, 
that royalist cries were occasionally uttered, and that thieves 
and beggars were numerous. 

4 Germinal {2/tfh March 1794). 
Opinions are divided, and the groups yesterday were extremely 
excited. It was remarked that in several groups many strangers, 
especially disguised soldiers, spoke, and in their observations 
showed more vehemence than the citizens of Paris on the circum- 
stances respecting the accused. But people calmly await the trial, 
yet they are incensed against the accused, and precautions will have 
to be taken in case of condemnation. 

6 Germinal. 
It was remarked with pain on the 4th that the guillotine on the 
Place de Greve was not ready at the moment when it should have 
been, and that the condemned man 2 had to wait more than twenty 
minutes for the execution of his sentence. The people grumbled a 
good deal. 

8 Germinal. 
There are slight murmurs by some at the time wasted in waiting 
at shop doors and markets, yet the constituted authorities are 
respected. 

10 Germinal. 
It is remarked that for some days in the groups and cafes the 
great talkers are silent. Some men are still persuaded that Hebert 
has been the victim of his patriotism, but they say so in a low tone. 
We are waiting for them to speak aloud, and are watching them. 

1 W. 140, 154, 170. 

2 Poitou, a priest who had taken the oath, but was said to have spoken of 
Louis XVI. as innocent. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 233 

1 1 Germinal. 
There is a little uneasiness respecting the dismissals and arrests 

of public functionaries. There is regret that men who appeared to 
deserve the public confidence should be presumed guilty. This 
trial is urgent. The ill-disposed, applauding these measures, seem 
to try and turn them to their own profit, but patriots of good faith, 
whose eyes are ever open on the events of the revolution, have 
unabated confidence in the Convention. 

12 Germinal. 
The uneasiness of good patriots at the arrest of Danton and 

other deputies sensibly diminishes. The indictment against them 
seems to have partially calmed men's minds, but people are not yet 
reassured as to the choice of the men who are to fill high public 
posts. Pitt's orators no longer talk, and give no sign of life. 

14 Germinal. 
The punishment of the traitors is everywhere discussed, and 
their partisans no longer venture to show themselves. 

16 Germinal. 
Yesterday's decree on accused persons who go the length of 

insulting national justice has been received with enthusiasm. 1 

17 Germinal. 
There was a considerable crowd yesterday both on the Place de 

la Revolution and on the route of the condemned. 2 Everybody 
applauded their execution. The greatest order everywhere prevailed. 

iS Germinal. 
The public mind since the execution of the traitors is assuming 
the tone of energy befitting the circumstances. Yesterday groups 
and theatres offered a less gloomy aspect, and conversation turned 
on the last moments of Danton, Lacroix, &c. . . . The more 
society is purged, the greater the mutual confidence between good 
citizens, and the more they watch suspicious people. 

27 Germinal. 

Yesterday's decree [for the expulsion of nobles and foreigners 

from Paris] was a surprise for the persons aimed at by it, and formed 

the subject of conversations in all the cafes. The moment it was 

passed people began packing up. The ci-devant Orleans [Palais 

1 The decree which gagged Danton and his fellow-prisoners. 

2 Danton, Desmoulin=>, and eleven others. 



234 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Royal] garden was then full of people uneasy as to means of 
departure. Well-informed sans-culottes calculate that Paris will 
have 15,000 fewer mouths to feed. 

28 Germinal. 
The thermometer of public opinion is at "set fair." 

30 Germinal. 
Everybody looks calmly on conspirators going to the scaffold. 
There is always a crowd to see them pass. Men's minds are more 
and more heated with the fire of patriotism, and all applaud 
revolutionary measures. Taciturn figures of antique type, apparently 
tired of life, are still, however, noticeable in the promenades or 
groups. 

I Florial. x 
Fanaticism drew its last breath to-day. Several tradesmen had 
opened their shops without respect to the ci-devant Easter, and 
were obliged, to close them for fear of being denounced in their 
sections by those who kept shut and who were numerous. The 
administration of police was at once informed of this, and hastened 
to invite wavering citizens to open their shops as usual, reminding 
them that religion had nothing in common with business. It is 
investigating the cause of this strange opening and closing of shops, 
which it presumes to be a vestige of fanaticism. 

2 Morial. 
The way in which the ci-devant fete of Easter was celebrated, 
and the affectation of keeping shops closed in several quarters of 
Paris, especially in the faubourg Antoine, rather disconcerted the 
sans-culottes, who only acknowledge Decadis. It was remarked 
that many people from the country round Paris came to swell the 
number of the endimanches, on the plea of the festival of the 
Eternal. The authors of this rumour of a festival, which seems to 
be connected with fanaticism and malice, are being searched for. 
Nothing, however, happened to disturb order, and the guillotine had 
simply all the more spectators. It is stated that an elementary 
schoolmistress in the rue Coquilliere 335, Social Contract section, 
being told by her husband, who professed to have heard it from his 
civil committee, that there would be a festival to the Eternal, 
dismissed some pupils, but having learnt otherwise from the citizens 
sent by the administration of police to undeceive people, she called 
her pupils back and held her class. 

1 April 20, 1794, Easter Sunday. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 235 

4 Florial. 

Yesterday a man at the Revolutionary Tribunal cried " Vive le 
roi I " at the moment when the condemned persons 1 were starting 
for the scaffold. He was arrested. Traitors are thus unmasking. 
With perseverance we shall catch them all. Our dandies scarcely 
venture to show themselves in the public promenades. The search 
for them was going on to-day. 

5 Florial. 
The widow d'Espremenil, incarcerated at the English convent, 

rue de Lourcine, has stabbed herself, but the wound is not mortal. 

8 Florial. 
A man was arrested yesterday in the rue du Ponceau, quarter 
Denis, who was writing on the walls of that street " Vive le roi, 
vive Louis XVII." This event shows that there is still in Paris a 
horde of counter-revolutionists. A general search in the forty-eight 
sections might produce a salutary effect, but for this purpose it 
would be necessary to await the expiration of the time allowed to 
ex-nobles and foreigners to leave Paris. 

12 Florial. 
The journeymen bakers continue their gatherings. They will 

not work except for 5 francs a day and their board. Several have 
no cockades on their hats. . . . Prostitutes appear on the scene 
with all the effrontery of which they are capable. 

13 Florial. 
The favourable news which we daily receive from our armies 

makes the strongest impression on men's minds. The 1st of this 
decade resembled the ci-devant Mondays. The wine-shops of Paris 
and its suburbs were full of citizens amusing themselves. It is 
surprising to see so many subordinate officers spend their time in 
the cafes and places of amusement. 

14 Florial. 
Yesterday, at the guard-house of the rue Antoine, Arsenal 

section, women were arrested for wearing blue or white ribbons. 
The arrests only lasted an instant. They were released on doffing 
the ribbons. Persons of both sexes were also arrested for having 
no cockades. Orders have been given to invite such persons with 
all possible civility to procure cockades. . . . The quay labourers 
refused to work, demanding higher wages. 

1 Malesherbes, who had defended Louis XVI., and twelve others. 



236 PARIS IN 1789-94 

17 Floreal. 
Thieves multiply. The markets are a new resource for them. 

They are constantly being arrested, but they laugh at punishment. 

18 Floreal. 

A new species of thief appears to-day in Paris. These men go 
to citizens arriving from the various departments, and under the 
guise of fraternity and friendship so delude them as to lead them to 
different wine-shops and cafes, make them drunk, and get hold of 
their money, substituting bits of common paper. . . . Men should 
be sent in the dress of country people, in order to be accosted and 
thereby discover the gang of these pretended obliging people. 
Several of them have offered gold at par for assignats on the pre- 
tence of rendering a service. These pretended gold coins are 
merely sous. . . . Fortune-tellers by cards are recommencing their 
oracles, and as far as they can, deceive weak minds. Several have 
been arrested. Measures are being taken to extirpate this accursed 
race of charlatans. 

19 Floreal. 
There are complaints of the preference shown by the commis- 
saries in the distribution of necessaries. At a distribution of butter 
in Observatory section there were many men. The crowd might 
number 2000. Several girls and women fainted. This squeeze was 
occasioned by a commissary of the section, who told the women to 
range themselves two abreast. Scarcely had they begun to do this 
when the shop was closed. The distribution was continued through 
an opening in the opposite house. There was a like crowd this 
morning at the new market. The crowd was so large that the 
national guards were near being knocked down. The women 
grumble, weep, and threaten. . . . The muscadins of the Egalite 
garden now collect in the Champs-Elysees. Their dress, their 
mysterious air, everything indeed shows them to be very suspicious. 
Among these promenaders are several of ci-devant Capet's body- 
guard. 

20 Floreal. 
At yesterday's execution 1 it was noticed that all the windows 

of carriage-people on the Place de la Revolution were closed in 
order not to see it. Their way of thinking may be construed in 
several ways. . . . The Convention is sincerely thanked for the 

1 Lavoisier and twenty-four other tax-farmers. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 237 

new blessing which it prepares us by providing hospitals for both 
sexes — for the infirm, aged, and crippled. People await the 
accomplishment of this measure. 

21 Florial. 
Arrests of deserters and young men of the first requisition are 

frequent. ... A turkey fetches 33 francs, a rabbit 10 francs, a 
chicken 10 francs, a lamb 55 francs. 1 

22 Floreal. 
The greatest tranquillity prevailed here yesterday during the 

executions [of princess Elisabeth and twenty-three others]. The 
sans-culottes were pleased to see traitors pay with their heads for 
the crimes against the republic by which they have sullied them- 
selves. The cafes of the maison Egalite [Palais Royal], as well as 
several others where certain persons formerly strutted, now present 
only a melancholy desert. The houses at the extremities of Paris 
whose back doors open on the country occasion uneasiness, and 
there is fear of anti-popular societies. 

23 Floreal. 
The men employed in unloading wood from the river yesterday 

again refused to work. Several spent the day in wine-shops, but 
most, though not all, were at work to-day. Order will gradually be 
restored. . . . This morning, at the distribution of eggs at the 
market, the crowd was so great that the cavalry had to be doubled 
and yet could do nothing. Several women were extricated half 
suffocated. These crowds become more and more riotous. Even 
the civil commissaries and police are no longer respected. The 
armed force [national guards] can now do nothing. It is high time 
to introduce a new system of distribution. 

26 Floreal. 
In spite of the prohibition of the police, loto is still played in 

some cafes, and much money is lost. The police are about to make 
a raid on these cafes. ... At the market the throng was so great 
that women emerged with their aprons lost or torn. 

27 Flore" al. 
Four men pretending to be saltpetre commissaries searched the 

house of St. Cyr, rue de Berry 8, and found in one of the cellars a 
leaden box eighteen or twenty inches deep by six or seven wide 

1 Of course in depreciated paper-money. 



238 PARIS IN 1789-94 

containing gold, of which they took possession, leaving the box, and 
made off. They have been arrested by the Rights of Man section 
on the declaration of a citizen connected with the police, and are 
still at the section. . . . There are complaints of brokers at the 
doors of the Mont de Piete. They collect in large numbers and 
accost all comers, asking them whether they have anything to sell, 
especially jewellery. 

28 Floreal. 
Print-sellers still exhibit very obscene engravings and plaster 
casts. There were some yesterday on the boulevards and under the 
arcades of the Place de lTndivisibilite. 

r Prairial. 
Last night and this morning citizens and citoyennes were seen 
re-entering Paris loaded with various provisions. 

2 Prairial [2\st May 1794). 
The police inspector this morning removed in the rue des Mar- 
mousets a sign " Hotel Notre Dame," showing fleurs-de-lis half 
effaced, but all has disappeared. 

4 Prairial. 
Several women have been sent to the lock-up, Rights of Man 

section, for presenting themselves no less than three times over for 
butter. 

5 Prairial. 
The butter at the grocers is quite like suet, more than half salt, 

and nobody will take it. 

8 Prairial. 
Citizens went in the afternoon to the Place de la Revolution, 
where they witnessed the punishment of Jourdan 1 and his accom- 
plices. All passed off very quietly. The people seemed much dis- 
pleased at the mockery affected by these wretches, for nearly all 
were laughing up to the last moment. One of them, while being 
pinioned, addressing the people said, "Adieu, Sans-Farine." A 
citizen replied, " If we are without flour thou art about to find that 
we are not without iron." 

1 Nicknamed Coupe-tete, on account of his massacres at Avignon. The so- 
called accomplices, entirely unconnected with him, were five nobles and fourteen 
of Dumouriez's officers. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 239 

10 Prairiai (291/1 May). 
I went at seven o'clock this morning to the market. The largest 
crowds which I saw were at the butter and egg stalls. The women 
seemed much displeased and said that certain vendors had spread a 
report on the previous day that provisions would be given out only 
from seven to eight in the morning, so that dtoyennes wanting sup- 
plies would only have that one hour, and this had occasioned the 
crowd. I saw that the crowds were swollen by numerous ill-disposed 
people and thieves who slipped among them. Peaceable citoyermes 
not venturing into the crowd for fear of being robbed, wait three 
or four hours without being able to procure anything and then go 
home. I saw dtoyennes who had been fortunate enough to get eggs, 
but on coming out of the crowd found them broken in their pockets. 
Several of them told me that the eating-house keepers carried off 
everything by money, and that several of their messengers had gone 
with baskets full of butter and eggs. 

15 Prairiai. 
The crowds at the butchers, grocers, and fruiterers seem 

to diminish a little. Beggars annoy the people, who complain 
of seeing them still, in spite of the law and of the sacrifices 
made to relieve them. It is high time to remedy this abuse. 
Yesterday the citizens waiting on the Place de Revolution for 
the execution of twelve condemned persons said a long time 
was being taken to condemn Admiral and [Cecile] Regnault. 1 
I heard pity expressed for them. A citizen beside me said it 
was not surprising they were not executed, inasmuch as they 
had more than six hundred accomplices. I know this man to 
be a small shopkeeper in the Champs Elysees. 

16 Prairiai. 
The crowds sensibly lessen. 2 The doors of the butchers, grocers, 

and fruiterers are no longer besieged. 

20 Prairiai. 
The crowds still collect at the doors of the butchers and 
fruiterers, but are less numerous. Paris, however, is well victualled, 
and I see that it is possible to obtain all the eatables you 

1 Admiral fired at Collot, and Cecile Regnault was suspected of intending to 
stab Robespierre. Both were executed on the 29th Prairiai together with fifty-two 
others, all in red shirts, as " parricides," Collot and Robespierre being considered 
fathers of the country. 

2 A prohibition had been issued. 



240 PARIS IN 1789-94 

want if you will pay above the maximum. The apparent scarcity 
of provisions arises solely from the rapacity of the tradesmen 
and the malice of our secret enemies. 

21 Prairial. 
Everywhere the happiest calmness has prevailed. Yesterday 
the people were pleased to see all their representatives 1 and 
to enjoy the beauty of the festival. After the ceremony they 
went to their homes with the tranquillity and propriety of a 
nation truly free. To-day they have rejoiced at the change of 
place of the guillotine. I heard a great number of citizens say : 
"With this change the sword of the law will lose none of its 
effect, and we can enjoy a promenade ' 2 which will become the 
finest in Europe." 

I have reserved to the last the reports of Jacobin Decadi 
services, for these require a word of explanation. 

In the autumn of 1793 the Paris Commune and sections 
undertook, after the adoption of the Jacobin calendar, the 
suppression of all religious services. Lacroix, not fore- 
seeing the guillotine, had exclaimed in the Convention 
on the 15th August, "the Constitution is our gospel, 
liberty is our God, I know no other," and Gobel's renun- 
ciation of the priesthood was the signal for this move- 
ment. Church after church in Paris was closed, and by 
the 23rd November religious worship had ceased. 

But what was to be done with the ci-devant churches ? 
Nature abhors a vacuum. " N'est detruit" Danton is 
credited with having first said, " que ce qui est retnplacey 
Busts of Marat and Lepelletier had been installed in 
the section rooms, but this could hardly be considered 
a form of worship. Moreover the Commune, on the 
very day of Gobel's apostasy, had rejected the sugges- 
tion of Quinze-Vingts section that St. Antoine's church 
should be dedicated to Liberty, and that an altar 
should be erected, with a fire upon it kept up by vestal 
virgins. It deprecated any "simulacrum for striking the 
popular imagination " as unworthy of Reason and truth, 

1 At the/#* de VEtre Suprtme. 2 The Champs Elysees. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 241 

sound morality and republican principles, things which 
should appeal not to the eyes but to the ears and minds 
of the public. But on the 8th November 1793 the Place 
Vendome section suggested the appointment of teachers 
of morality, "to cast into oblivion the ridiculous sermons 
of the past"; the Bonnes Nouvelles section arranged 
for Decadi lectures in its ci-devant church, and the 
Commune invited other sections to imitate it. The Com- 
mune itself on the 1st December arranged for — shall I 
say a service ? at any rate a gathering every Decadi 
in Notre Dame, the royal effigies on which, like the 
sculptured saints on all the other church fronts, had 
been effaced. The Declaration of the Rights of Man 
was first to be read, next the Constitution, and then 
any despatches from the army. New laws were also 
to be proclaimed. After these preliminaries there was 
to be an address on public morality. Patriotic hymns, 
with instrumental accompaniment, were to close the 
proceedings. After the fashion of Venice, a bouche 
de verite was to be placed in the building, to receive 
complaints and suggestions, probably denunciations like- 
wise, for the welfare of the Republic or the Commune. 
Anonymous notes, however, were forbidden. Every 
Decadi the "mouth of truth" was to disgorge. 

At the Tuileries section Delaurent took for three 
texts the good father, the good mother, and the good 
son, and he printed for its use "morning and evening 
republican prayer," comprising an invocation to liberty, 
the creed, and the commandments. The "invocation" 
was a parody of the Lord's prayer, and the creed a 
parody of the Apostles' creed, one clause being : " I believe 
in the speedy destruction of all tyrants and rebels, in 
the regeneration of morals, in the diffusion of virtues, 
and in the everlasting dream of liberty." The eighth and 
ninth commandments read thus : — 

A la section tu viendras, 

Convoquee legalement ; 
Ta boutique tu fermeras, 

Chaque Decadi strictement. 



242 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The general meeting of Gobelins section resolved 
on opening St. Martin's church as a temple of the Supreme 
Being, and florists were invited to decorate it with orange 
trees and other shrubs. 

These lectures or services took place on the Jacobin 
Sabbath, Decadi, and the best collection of these (shall we 
call them lay sermons ?) is that of Guillaume Tell or Mail 
section, delivered in the Petits Peres church. Tell was 
made much of by the French revolutionists ; indeed his 
apotheosis may be attributed to them ; yet at that very 
time Haller, in a book publicly burnt at Berne, had first 
thrown doubts on his existence. The Mail section, so 
called from the still existing street of that name, had taken 
his name for its new title. " Recognising the existence of 
a Supreme Being, approving the abolition of error and 
falsehood, considering that a republic cannot exist without 
morality, that morality necessarily springs from virtue, and 
that virtue would be only an empty word without the idea 
of a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed inno- 
cence, and sooner or later punishes triumphant crime," it 
resolved that orators of morality should every Decadi 
deliver speeches reminding the people of their impre- 
scriptible rights and of the sacred duties they have to 
fulfil, of marching constantly with firm step under the 
standards of liberty. Accordingly on the 20th November 
citoyens and citoyennes assembled at 11 o'clock in the new 
temple of morality. All the monuments, statues, pictures, 
and ornaments of superstition had been removed. On the 
high altar, amid laurels, roses, and orange trees, was a 
statue of liberty, six feet in height. The organ pealed the 
" hymn of liberty," the " Marseillaise," thousands of voices 
repeating the chorus : — 

Aux armes, citoyens, formez vos bataillons ; 
Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons. 

Citizen Etienne Barry then spoke on the origin of religious 
institutions. Two hundred francs were collected for 
suffering humanity in a basket at the foot of the statue. 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 



2 43 



Outside the temple confessional boxes, missals, relics, and 
ornaments were made a bonfire, amid cheers for the republic. 
Ten days later Gerard Michel Bontemps denounced fanati- 
cism and " Papism." He concluded by exclaiming, " I 
tranquilly await the moment assigned for the destruction 
of this frail body. My soul will with confidence fly to Thy 
[God's] paternal breast ; Thou wilt receive my last breath, 
and wilt permit it to utter once more those sacred words, 
Vive la Republiquel" On the 20th January 1794 a poplar, 
as a tree of liberty, was planted in the square outside, for 
many trees of liberty were dead or withering, so that the 
Convention had ordered the substitution of new ones. 
Boulland spoke of the "bray" of mythological anthems 
and the " buzz " of dog-Latin psalms as happily superseded 
by republican hymns. Dancing was kept up till three next 
morning. Bontemps, on the 30th January, delivered a 
long address at the Jacobin club on the crimes of the 
English people, which he had probably pronounced on the 
previous day at the section temple. On the 19th April the 
address was on the existence of a God and the immortality 
of the soul. On another occasion a printer named Massot 
inveighed against celibacy as originating in selfishness and 
ending in debauchery. He had to confess that he was 
himself unmarried, but he hinted that he had an attach- 
ment for a girl whose parents were opposed to the match. 
Agriculture and the dangers of ignorance furnished other 
texts. On the 7th August, the Decadi after Robespierre's 
fall, the perils of idolising public men in a republic were 
appropriately dwelt upon. The American ambassador 
Monroe and his wife were present. They had just arrived 
in Paris and were probably staying close by, at White's 
hotel. Various provincial municipalities and clubs sub- 
scribed for these lectures, evidently that they might be 
re-delivered, and when the printer, Massot, was arrested, 
the section pleaded for his speedy trial, so that the publica- 
tion might not be interrupted. This probably conduced to 
his acquittal on the 14th April. 

A sort of liturgy, entitled " Office des Decadis, ou discours, 



244 PARIS IN 1789-94 

hymnes, et prieres en usage dans les Temples de laRaison," 
was published in the spring of 1794, and went through two 
editions. Joseph Ch6nier wrote one of the "hymns," but 
the chief contributors were Dusausoir and Delaurent. 
The former wrote several addresses, which were read in 
the church of St. Roch, re-named Temple of Roch, by 
boys eight or ten years of age. The addresses inculcated 
patriotism, morality, domestic virtues, and kindness to 
animals. There were prayers to the Supreme Being and 
invocations to Liberty, as also one to the Sans-culottides, 
the five days between Fructidor and Vendemiaire which 
supplemented the twelve months of thirty days, and bore 
the names of Virtue, Genius, Labour, Opinion, and Recom- 
pense. " Happy, O Sans-culottides," we read, " a thousand 
times happy, he who, imbued with the ideas which you 
evoke, can say to himself : — 

J'honore les vertus, j'admire le Genie, 

Mon travail suffit pour ma vie ; 
II suffit pour nourrir ma femme et mes enfants. 
Je soulage en secret la timide indigence ; 
Le bon sens sert de guide a mon opinion. 
Bien servir mon pays est mon ambition, 
Et quand je l'ai servi, voila ma recompense." 

This liturgy, though containing attacks on Catholicism, 
is exempt from parodies, whereas in Poitevin's Catechisme 
Ripublicain the seven sacraments are travestied. Baptism 
is the regeneration of the French, commenced the 14th 
July 1789 ; penance is the wandering life of traitors to 
the country ; the communion is the association offered to 
all rational peoples by the French republic, so as to form 
on the earth but one great family of brothers, no longer 
acknowledging or giving incense to idol or tyrant ; con- 
firmation is the election of the Convention ; consecration 
to the priesthood is the abolition of clerical celibacy ; 
marriage, universal peace and mutual help ; extreme 
unction, the annihilation of all tyrants and conspirators. 
Pithoud, moreover, who styled himself the "first apostle 
of Reason," published what he termed four republican 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 245 

sermons. These commenced with the formula, " In the 
name of the God of heaven and earth, in the name of 
Nature, Reason, and Patrie our mother. So be it " — 
"the substitute of regenerate Frenchmen for the for- 
mula of imposture." The " sermons " are denunciations 
of Catholicism or moral exhortations. 

The reports of the "observers of public spirit" furnish 
us with some details of these services. 

On the 10th Pluvidse (29th January 1794) Bacon 
writes : — 

A citizen mounted the pulpit of truth at the ci-devant Bonnes 
Nouvelles church, and read a dialogue between a Frenchman and an 
inhabitant of Philadelphia, that is to say, an American. This citizen 
spoke so as to be understood by the masses, and produced a good 
effect. A good voice and action riveted the attention of the 
auditors. He was repeatedly applauded, especially at this phrase, 
" Friends, no peace with kings, eaters of human flesh ; they must be 
all at our knees. We must begin with the savage islander Georges 
Dandin [George III.]. All tyrants must die, even should we be 
doomed to live on bread and roots. The bread will be for those at 
the frontiers, and the roots for those remaining at home." Another 
citizen then occupied the pulpit, and there were recitations before 
the people, who were in large numbers, of the Declaration of 
Rights, verses in honour of the martyrs of liberty, and republican 
catechisms by young children of both sexes whom he had trained 
during the decade. The mothers of these young republicans wept 
for joy, and the spectacle was very touching. Various patriotic 
songs were then sung, which stirred the soul and inflamed the 
heart for liberty and equality. Advice to the magistrates : Forbid 
having a collection for the poor during the sermon, for this makes 
you lose good passages of the discourse. Give orders that no dogs 
should enter the church, for they make much noise and distract 
attention. 1 

1 A pamphlet containing the regulations for these "services" shows that the 
proceedings commenced with the announcement of births, marriages, divorces, 
and deaths. Virtuous acts witnessed in the section were then related. Three 
"orators of morality," each to officiate one Decadi, were elected every month. 
One qualification required was "good morals," for "is a man likely to teach 
others what he does not himself practise ? " 



246 PARIS IN 1789-94 

At the ci-devant St. Laurent church three citizens read the 
decrees of the Convention ; all three had poor voices, and read and 
pronounced badly. Many citizens en vert, I mean artisans, were at 
this temple of Reason. Several left, saying, " It is a pity there is 
so much noise, and the reading is so bad that one is forced to go 
away." Indeed, children three or four years old are allowed to 
enter, unaccompanied by their mothers, and they amuse themselves 
with the dogs. This disgusts citizens from coming to get instruc- 
tion. Recommendation : The sections should be invited to issue 
regulations for keeping order on the days when the decrees of the 
Convention are read. This is all the more urgent a"s at St. Laurent 
I saw women in sabots constantly changing their seats in order to 
make a noise, so that nothing might be heard. 

Charmont reports : — 

The festival of Reason was celebrated yesterday in the ci-devant 
church of St. Etienne du Mont. There was an immense concourse 
of citizens of both sexes. A grand discourse was delivered on the 
successes of the troops of the republic over the despots. 

On the 30th Pluviose Le Breton reports : — 

There has been a civic festival at the temple of Reason (the old 
Notre Dame church) in rejoicing for the decree of the Convention 
in favour of men of colour and for enfranchising negroes. A speech 
was delivered which appeared to make a great impression and was 
warmly applauded. I noticed, however, two canons of the old 
chapter who seemed to me anything but pleased at the use made 
of their church. This festival chiefly consisted of twelve members 
from each section. 

Another observer says : — 

A prodigious crowd filled the temple of Reason and listened in 
silence to the Declaration of Rights. A grand discourse was then 
delivered in honour of Nature and the deliverance of men so as to 
form but one family. Numerous plaudits terminated a glorious 
festival. 

Chaumont reports : — 

Every citizen who met another said, " Where art thou going ? " 
" I am going to the temple of Reason to hear some fine patriotic 
discourse. Formerly I understood nothing of what was said, 
whereas now love of country leads me there, to learn my rights and 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 247 

duties, and I always take care to read beforehand the Bulletin de la 
Convention and the Observateur Sans-Culotte, to be posted up in the 
news of the day." 

Bacon reports : — 

To-day at the ci-devant Bonnes Nouvelles church there were 
sentinels, and the dogs were driven out. The greatest quiet 
prevailed. Here is what passed. The church of which I speak 
was full of people, and there were many of the young of both sexes. 
A citizen made several of them (the oldest might be nine or ten) 
recite the Declaration of Rights and some chapters of the republican 
Constitution. The young people were repeatedly applauded, and 
on all sides there were cries of " Vive la Republique, Vive la 
Convention, Vive la Montagne." Another citizen then occupied the 
pulpit of truth. He read a short address full of morality, patriotism, 
and philanthropy, but chiefly bearing on fanaticism, the crimes of 
kings, horror of federalism, and love of liberty. The discourse, read 
with grace — the orator had a sonorous voice and good action — 
produced, I venture to say, a great effect, and I noticed that it 
thrilled the audience. This passage was much applauded: "What 
gratitude is due to the sacred Mountain [the Jacobin deputies], to 
the National Convention, and to the Public Safety Committee for 
creating the insurrection of the 31st May [the arrest of the Girondin 
deputies], which saved the country and destroyed federalism. But 
for that sacred insurrection the brigands [Vendeans], with their 
crosses, chaplets, banners, and saints, would have arrived in Paris. 
Brave Parisians, where should we have been?" ("Vive a jamais la 
Convention 1 ") This passage also was warmly applauded : " And 
you, honest English sans-culottes, we shall give you liberty, for you 
will soon have no lords or clergy, no king Georges Dandin or Pitt, 
the most contemptible of men. We shall extend our arms to you." 
(Everybody exclaimed : " That will soon happen.") Again, this 
phrase evoked general plaudits prolonged for some minutes : " No 
peace with kings. Their entire destruction is necessary. The 
peasant in his hut must receive the reward due to his virtue." 
("Bravo, vive, vive, et vive la Republique 1 "') Lefevre, a singer at 
the Opera, gave patriotic songs and the " Marseillaise." . . . 
More than 400 copies of a speech on education by Jault, 1 a member 

1 Jault, who was guillotined with Robespierre, published several Decadi 
addresses. In one of them he commented on the waste of food entailed by 
keeping dogs, cats, birds, and monkeys. He had found in one house with six 
tenants io dogs, 4 cats, 12 canaries, and 2 parrots. 



248 PARIS IN 1789-94 

of the Paris Commune, were sold. There was quite a scramble for 
them. The tree of liberty, carried by several sections, next made 
the round of the section. . . . 

At the ci-devant church of St. Laurent citizens read to the 
people decrees of the Convention and republican catechisms. Very 
revolutionary songs were sung. 

There were many people at the temple of Philosophy, but at 
least three-fourths of the women were dressed in cloaks and round 
caps, I mean like country people. There were many of the young. 
A song on the abolition of religion was repeatedly and laughingly 
applauded by the young women. Here is the last stanza of a 
couplet which evoked much applause : — 

De cette eucharistie tant vantde 
Nous en avons fait du pain-a-cacheter. 

I remarked that at the expression pain-a-cacheter the old women 
stamped. The men laughed and took snuff, so strong a pinch that 
the sneezing was like the discharge of a cannon. This other refrain 
was much applauded : — 

La vraie religion 

Est a aimer notre Constitution. 

Other songs on the crimes of kings excited warm applause. A boy 
of ten then gave a song on the capture of Toulon, and a couplet 
of this extolled Robespierre. A member named Thibaut (for I 
inquired the name) of section [faubourg du] Nord asked to speak to 
the people, and said : " Citizens, I love and esteem Robespierre, 
but the living should never be flattered or have altars erected to 
them till after death. We have had five years' experience. For 
five years we have been kneading human dough. No praise there- 
fore of living men, for liberty and equality will always be in danger." 
There was no applause, but people said in a low tone, " Thibaut is 
right." The couplet I speak of has been suppressed. 

On the 10th Ventose (28th February) Bacon writes : — 

At the temple of Reason, Bonnes Nouvelles section, there were 
many people, especially women. Patriotic hymns were sung. 
Children of both sexes recited the republican commandments. 
But a youth, aged 1 3, named Chaper, spoke for full three-quarters of 
an hour on the blessings of a republican government. He drew 
tears from all who heard him, and on all sides there were cries of 



PARIS DAY BY DAY 249 

" Vive la republique I " . . .At the temple of Reason, Gravilliers 
section, four children, the eldest of whom seemed to be four years 
old, recited the Declaration of Rights. They were warmly applauded, 
and there was a scramble to kiss them. A citizen congratulated the 
mothers of these young republicans on their patriotism in thus 
betimes teaching their children the principles of republicanism. 

On the 10th Germinal (30th March) Bacon again 
writes : — 

At the temple of Reason, ci-devant Sorbonne church, section 
Chalier, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was read, as also 
several decrees of the Convention. Patriotic hymns were sung, and 
a citizen read the speech of St. Just, member of the Public Safety 
Committee [accusing Danton]. It was repeatedly applauded, with 
cries of " Vive la republique ! " There were a considerable number 
of women. The decrees [against Danton] produced a great effect 
on all hearers, and inspired a profound hatred for all the con- 
spirators. Near me men in jackets said : " One shudders to think 
of this conspiracy. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, where should we be 
but for the Public Safety Committee?" 

This new religion, ephemeral as it proved to be, pro- 
duced quite a literature of its own. Not only hymns and 
catechisms, but tracts were numerous. One of the most 
curious of these publications is the Vie et Mort republicaine 
du Petit Emilien, by Freville. It is the biography of the 
author's young son, and the Moniteur of the 28th October 
1794 said of it : — 

One cannot read without emotion this simple and artless history 
of a child whom a premature death has just snatched from his parents, 
inconsolable for his loss. Little Emilien, scarcely seven years of age, 
had already shown virtues which would honour men of ripe age. 
He seemed to breathe only for the republic. The love of country 
which governed all the actions of a too short life supported him in 
a long and painful agony. 

Freville, a schoolmaster who seems to have anticipated 
some of the ideas of Frobel, tells us how Emilien, the 
"fruit of a sixteen months' pregnancy," began feeding 



250 PARIS IN 1789-94 

himself when four months old, how he took. Chinese 
figures painted on a screen for living beings and offered 
one of them food, and how keenly he was disappointed 
when illness prevented him from accompanying his father 
to the festival of Reason. This was the date of the 
commencement of his malady. The poor boy had his blue 
coat and tiny sword placed on his bed ; he sang, though 
in pain, the " Marseillaise" ; and he asked a kind neighbour 
who visited him how the armies were going on, and whether 
Bailly, the ex-mayor of Paris, had been guillotined. " Yes, 
my child." li Oh, he well deserved it." Did we not here 
find a mere echo of the father's sentiments, we might 
exclaim, as did John Huss when he saw a peasant woman 
bring a faggot to his funeral pyre, " O sancta simplicitas ! " 
One of Emilien's last utterances was, " What most grieves 
me, mamma, is to leave thee and to be unable to serve the 
republic." 

A eulogium of him was published in the newspapers, 
and sent by the Arsenal section to the Education committee 
of the Convention. Three tracts or treatises held up this 
poor child to admiration. He was a boy saint of the new 
religion. 



CHAPTER VI 

LIFE IN PARIS 

Ordinary Routine — Advertisements — Apathy or Terror — Nightmare — 
Theatres — Festivals — Fine Arts — Academies — Dress — Pauperism — 
Strikes — Assignats — Forced Gifts — Inventions — Auctions and 
Speculation — Crime — Delation — Heroism. 

Vivid as is the picture of Parisian life during the Terror 
furnished by these confidential reports, they require to 
be supplemented. They tell us abundantly what happened 
in the streets, the markets, the cafes, but they do not 
tell us enough of the ordinary life of individuals, of the 
weight of Jacobin coercion, of the difficulties of the 
currency, of the changes of property, or of acts of 
cowardice and heroism. They are silent on the condition 
of the stage and the fine arts, and on the progress of 
science and invention. Even on the dearth, the working 
of the maximum, the prevalence of poverty and crime, 
and the Jacobin festivals, they are not sufficiently ample. 
To complete the picture, therefore, of Parisian life it 
is necessary to consult other official manuscripts, together 
with newspapers and memoirs, for, though these are not 
always entitled to implicit credence, we may by com- 
paring and weighing their testimony arrive approximately 
at the facts. 

We are apt to think that the ordinary life of a com- 
munity is in abeyance during great events, and that 
all eyes are fixed in enthusiasm or anguish on the 
historic scene passing before them. But just as the 
Diary of Machyn, a London mercer, published by the 
Camden Society in 1848, shows us that during changes 
of religion and an attempted change of dynasty London 



252 PARIS IN 1789-94 

tradesmen, though noting what took place and interested in 
it, attended quietly to their business, so, during the Terror, 
Parisians ate, drank, and slept, worked, went shopping, 
married, divorced, wrote letters, and even amused them- 
selves. The truth is that history is in general the record 
of the deeds of a small minority. The great majority 
have a livelihood to earn, and can spare only a passing 
thought or glance for tragedies and crises. 

What Prudhomme wrote of the day of the execution 
of Louis XVI. will apply to other sanguinary dates of 
the Revolution : — 

The milkwomen came as usual with their cans and the market 
gardeners with their vegetables, going home with their wonted 
liveliness, singing couplets on a guillotined king. . . . The theatres 
were all open. . . . There was a ball in the evening at the extremity 
of the pont Louis XVI. 

A large crowd, indeed, collected along the boulevards 
to see Louis on his way from the Temple to the scaffold, 
and a denser crowd filled the Place de la Concorde 
to witness his decapitation ; but the women returned 
to their households and the men to their work after 
the unfortunate monarch had passed or had been be- 
headed. And a still larger number of people did not 
even go to see the last of him, but went on with their 
ordinary vocations. The unpublished records of the 
Prefecture of Police consist almost exclusively on this 
eventful day, as on uneventful ones, of the most common- 
place incidents. It is true they show that Mauricot 
(or Moricaud), a grocer, a captain in the National Guard, 
was arrested for saying that if there were many men 
like himself they would prevent the execution, 1 that 
another man was apprehended for anti-civic talk, a 
third at the cafe Valois for "having the air of mocking 
the patriots," and a fourth, an artisan, for saying he 
would give his own head to save the King's. They also 
speak of the seizure of a sword-cane belonging to an 

1 He was guillotined with the Luxembourg batch on 9th July I794- 



LIFE IN PARIS 253 

Englishman, of several other persons being armed with 
sword-canes, and of a man tearing down the decrees 
of the Convention. But alongside these episodes we 
hear of a foundling being picked up in the streets and 
sent to an asylum, of a journeyman hairdresser being 
drunk and disorderly, and of two women being suffocated 
by charcoal fumes. And on other memorable days there 
is not even a trace of politics. Thus on the 14th July 
1790, the " Feast of Pikes," as Carlyle styles it, the only 
police record is the arrest of an Englishman for pocket- 
picking, which seems already to have been an English 
speciality. Again on the 10th Thermidor, when Robes- 
pierre met his fate, we hear of a lost child in the Champs 
Elysees being discovered by a workman, of a purse being 
lost, of a scavenger being arrested as drunk and dis- 
orderly, and of the seizure of pork unfit for food. So 
also on the day of the Queen's execution, on that of 
the Girondins, of Princess Elisabeth, or of Fouquier- 
Tinville or Carrier, the police records speak merely of 
accidents or suicides. On the 18th Brumaire, when 
Bonaparte seized on the government, we are told only of 
two chimneys on fire. 

The same impression is given us by the advertisements 
in the Petites Affiches. They show that the theatres 
were open as usual, that schools were carried on, and 
that lessons in drawing and painting were given, as 
also (but these were suspended at the height of the 
Terror) lessons in foreign languages. The farming-out 
of chairs in churches was let by auction as usual in July 
1793. Numerous land companies held out temptations 
to emigration, notwithstanding the disastrous collapse of 
Joel Barlow's Scioto (Illinois) company. There is, how- 
ever, another side to the picture in the sales of furniture or 
houses of the guillotined or emigres, and in many sales 
of estates. There are also numerous advertisements of 
persons missing and of addresses wanted. 

A sale of unredeemed pledges was going on in Paris 
on the 9th Thermidor, the furniture of Fontainebleau 



254 PARIS IN 1789-94 

palace was being sold in that town, and in the evening, 
while the Convention and the Commune were preparing 
for the conflict, theatre-goers were listening to Romeo 
and Juliet, Paul and Virginia, and William Tell. At the 
beginning of Thermidor, moreover, horses and carriages 
were announced for sale, though one would have sup- 
posed that carriage-people had all left Paris, 1 especially 
as nobles had been expressly forbidden to reside in it. 
Domestic servants, even valets, were advertised for or 
solicited situations. So also with housekeepers and gover- 
nesses. Widows of mature age without incumbrance 
advertised for husbands, one requiring help to manage 
a small farm, another offering "to join in labours bene- 
fiting the republic or mankind, or in any other employ- 
ment satisfying the reason and heart." About half-a-dozen 
men responded by advertisement to these overtures. In 
1791 the Courrier de V Hymen, appearing twice a week, 

contained advertisements after this fashion : — 



A lady aged 28, English, a native of London, who has received 
all the education that can be imparted to a well-born demoiselle, and 
who, accustomed to good society, combines with it a knowledge of 
the French language, and as to fortune has now 900 francs a year, 
which is capable of increase to 2000 francs on the death of her 
parents, wishes to join her destiny with a man of thirty to thirty- 
eight, French, of mild and affable character, having property, but 
especially much feeling and sincerity. 

A collection of republican songs, quack medicines, 
drapery goods, restaurant dinners at 4 francs, hair-dyes, 
a forte-piano (as the new instrument was then styled), 
were likewise offered. Loans were wanted for starting 
in business, and a young man coming up from the country 
required a clerkship. Wet-nurses proffered their services. 
Watches and other articles were lost or found. There 

1 Princess Lubomirska, however, unconscious of the guillotine which awaited 
her, went with her four-years-old daughter to Paris in October 1 792, taking 
three servants with her, and for thirteen months mixed in what remained of 
fashionable society, visiting Madame Dubarry and patronising portrait painters. 



LIFE IN PARIS 255 

were sales of houses and furniture, and also of books. 
Conveyances of property were going on. The confiscated 
papers of Dufourleur, a notary much employed by the 
duke of Orleans, and guillotined on the 21st May 1794, 
show that contracts and legal business of all kinds were 
not interrupted. So again with divorces, which, as in the 
case of Madame Condorcet's suit, were sometimes a con- 
certed mode of saving property from confiscation. 

We naturally ask whether the Terror nevertheless did 
not weigh like a nightmare on the Parisians. Upon this 
point the memoirs of contemporaries differ. Lavalette, 
afterwards famous for his escape from prison in 18 16, an 
eyewitness of the massacres of September 1792, says : — 

A thousand yards from the prisons people affected not to know 
that Frenchmen were being massacred by hundreds. Shops were 
open, amusements going on in all their liveliness ; all the frivolities, 
all the seductions, of luxury, sensuality, and debauch were placidly 
exercising their sway. Ignorance was affected of horrors which 
there was not courage to oppose. 1 

Etienne Del6cluze, in his Vie de Louis David, describes 
how in the daytime business went on and made people 
forget the Terror, but how at night, the streets being almost 
deserted, parents at the 9 o'clock supper hushed their chil- 
dren's merriment, listened anxiously to the heavy footfalls 
of the patrol, and were in anxious suspense when revo- 
lutionary committees were heard passing, engaged in 
domiciliary visits, and perhaps knocking at a neighbour's 
door. Nobody ventured to open the window to see what 
was happening, and great relief was felt when the commis- 
saries went further on. Delecluze's mother, unable one 
day to avoid the guillotine carts, leaning on the parapet of 
the bridge, trembling and almost fainting, had to overcome 
her emotion on a friendly admonition from a bystander that 

1 Lavalette, Mimoires. While in prison under sentence of death in 1816 
he had a dream, apparently lasting for hours but really only three minutes, of a 
procession of carts loaded with bleeding corpses, amid streets filled with agonised 
spectators. This dream was perhaps partly due to his recollections of the Terror. 



256 PARIS IN 1789-94 

displays of sensibility were dangerous. Joseph Droz, the 
future Academician, who was then nineteen years of age, 

says : — 

I saw Paris in those days of crime and mourning. From the 
stupor of people's countenances you would have said it was a city 
desolated by a contagious disease. The vociferations or laughter of 
a few cannibals alone interrupted the deadly silence which sur- 
rounded you. Human dignity was no longer maintained except by 
the victims who, with serene front on the scaffold, departed without 
regret from a dishonoured earth. . . . Such was the prostration and 
stupor that if a condemned man had been told, "Thou shalt go to 
thy house and there wait till the cart passes to-morrow and mount 
into it," he would have done so. 1 

The mother of General Cavaignac, then a girl of four- 
teen, says : — 

Every morning at breakfast the newspaper brought the list of 
the condemned, and however enthusiastic you were for the Revolu- 
tion it was impossible not to be terrified and grieved at the means 
which it had to employ. 2 

The future General Lejeune, returning to Paris, at the 
age of seventeen, in 1793, after a campaign under Du- 
mouriez, says : — 

Heads were carried on pikes through the streets. All honest 
minds were chilled with terror. Anybody decently dressed became 
a " suspect " for the mob, and was imprisoned. 

He himself, invited out to lunch and being rather 
smartly dressed, was denounced by a " patriot " as a mus- 
cadin, was taken from lock-up to lock-up, and was confined 
with other delinquents in the crypt of St. Martin's church. 
Not till 10 at night were they brought before Hanriot and 
Santerre, and not till midnight were they set at liberty. 
Lejeune, hemmed in one day by the crowd, saw Marie 
Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, the cart going at a 
snail's pace to prolong her agony and satisfy the savage 

1 Droz, CEuvres, ii. 325. 2 Memoires d'une Inconnue, 1894. 



LIFE IN PARIS 257 

curiosity of the mob. Some like himself commiserated, 
but not one dared to express that feeling. 

Even arrest was sometimes a relief, as Pasquier, the 
future Chancellor, a prisoner with his wife at St. Lazare, 
tells us : — 

Out of prison you could not venture to meet, speak, or scarcely 
look at each other, so afraid were you of compromising one another. 
The most intimate friends kept quite apart. If you heard a knock 
at the door you immediately fancied that revolutionary commissaries 
had come to carry you off. Behind the bars, on the contrary, you 
re-entered society, as it were. You were surrounded by your rela- 
tives and friends. You saw them without constraint. You con- 
versed freely with them. 

The abbe Morellet, the well-known Encyclopedist, re- 
suming in 1796, after three years' suspension, his corre- 
spondence with Lord Shelburne, says : — 

I have been a witness of these assassinations [mentioning several 
of his friends], being forced, either by tyrannical laws or the impossi- 
bility of living elsewhere in any security, to inhabit the city of blood, 
where this spectacle was daily repeated quite close to my dwelling, 
having no feeling but indignation and horror, ashamed of being a 
man and of belonging to a people not merely cowardly enough to 
tolerate so many atrocities, but savage or stupid enough to feast its 
eyes daily on them. 1 

Even Morellet's sleep was disturbed by horrible night- 
mares. He fancied himself being arrested, or defending his 
liberty by stabbing his assailant. Having in this state more 
than once flung himself out of bed on the floor, at the risk 
of dashing his head against the marble top of his chest of 
drawers, he had to stretch a cord across the bed, so as to 
awake in the act of springing out. 2 So, too, the abbe 
Maury, though safe in exile, is said to have dreamed of 

1 Lettres d Shelburne, Paris, 1898. 

2 Wordsworth, in like manner, after passing through Paris on his way home, 
shortly after the massacres of September 1 792, used to dream that he was pleading 
for his own life or the lives of others before the sham tribunal. 

R 



258 PARIS IN 1789-94 

being arrested, imprisoned, tried, and taken to the scaffold. 
He mounted the steps, placed his neck on the block, and — 
was awakened by the top of his bedstead having fallen on 
his neck. This little accident had with incredible rapidity 
produced the dream before arousing him. The comte de 
Segur, while a prisoner, heard the clock begin to strike 
midnight, fell asleep and dreamt of prolonged massacres, 
woke up with a start at some unusual noise, and heard the 
clock still striking. 

Yet Mollien, afterwards Napoleon's minister, on visiting 
Paris in March 1793, was surprised to find the usual 
lounging crowd in the Place de la Revolution (Concorde) ; 
and Blanc, one of the " observers of public spirit," writing 
on the 20th May 1793, says of the rich and well-to-do : — 

Leave them their former pleasures, do not deprive them of the 
amusement of travelling hither and thither within the bounds of the 
republic, do not force them to join the army, and even if they were 
subjected to heavier taxes they will not make the slightest move- 
ment. You will not even know that they exist, and the greatest 
question which they will discuss in days when they are argumenta- 
tive will be this : "Is there as much amusement under the republi- 
can government as under the old system ? " 1 

Certain amusements, however, were considerably inter- 
fered with by the Terror, particularly the theatres. Actors, 
and occasionally spectators also, had their trials. There 
were no longer, as at the earlier stage of the Revolution, 
scuffles between royalists and republicans, for the former 
had disappeared or had been silenced, nor did the specta- 
tors any longer attempt to dictate what pieces should be 

1 This reminds us of what Addison wrote from Blois in 1699 to Joseph Waring : 
'* Truly by what I have seen of 'em the French are the Happiest Nation in the 
world. It is not in the power of want or slavery to make them miserable. There 
is nothing to be met with but mirth and Poverty. Every one Laughs, sings, and 
Starves." Cowper, who had not seen France, says the same thing : — 

The Frenchman, easy, debonnair and brisk, 
Give him his lass, his fiddle, and his frisk, 
Is always happy, reign whoever may, 
And laughs the sense of misery away. 



LIFE IN PARIS 259 

played ; but the Commune ruled the theatres with a rod of 
iron. On the 2nd September 1793 " Pamela," by Francois de 
Neufchateau, was played at the Com^die Francaise. It had 
been expurgated to suit the Public Safety Committee, but 
the lines — 

Ah ! les persecuteurs sont les plus condamnables, 
Et les plus tolerants sont les plus pardonnables, 

excited the protest of a Jacobin. " No political toleration," 
he exclaimed, " it is a crime." The whole house rose and 
silenced him, but he went and complained to the Jacobin 
club, and next day all the actors were arrested. Most of 
them remained eleven months in prison, and they narrowly 
escaped being put on trial. Francois de Neufchateau 
himself, though a martyr to gout, was eighteen months in 
confinement, and the piece was not revived till August 
1795. Never under the old monarchy had the censorship 
been so strict. In three months, twenty-three pieces out 
of 151 were rejected, and twenty-five others had to be 
altered. Nearly all Moliere was tabooed. Even Voltaire's 
" Brutus" and " Mort de Cesar " had to be " corrected," and 
his " Mahomet " was prohibited. The pieces which found 
favour were Jacobin tirades, and burlesques on religion and 
royalty. 1 Even the Opera gave revolutionary spectacles. 

No wonder real dramatists were silent. In vain did the 
Public Safety Committee, on the 16th March 1793, invite 
poets, historians, and playwrights to celebrate the achieve- 
ments of the Revolution. Ducis, wisely declining the charge 
of the Paris National Library, lived undisturbed at Marly or 
Versailles. Prior to the Revolution he had adapted " Ham- 
let," " Romeo and Juliet," " Lear," and " Macbeth," and he 
brought out ll King John " in June 1791, but it ran only a few 
nights. In December 1792 he brought out " Othello," but 
though he had made Othello (acted by Talma) stab Desde- 
mona instead of suffocating her, several women fainted, and 
there were such murmurs that he altered it and made it 
end happily. The piece, however, did not draw, and Ducis 
waited for better times. It is true that " All's Well that Ends 

1 Two made sport of George III.'s insanity. 



26o PARIS IN 1789-94 

Well " was acted in July 1792, and " Romeo and Juliet," 
"much simplified," in September 1793. Writing to Vallier, 
who had sought to rouse him from his lethargy, Ducis 
says : — 

Why talk to me of writing tragedies ? Tragedy is being played 
in the streets. If I stir out of my house I am ankle-deep in blood. 
It is useless for me on returning home to shake the dust from my 
shoes. I say to myself like Macbeth, "Blood will have blood." 
Farewell, therefore, to tragedy. I have seen too many Atreus's in 
sabots to venture producing any on the stage. It is a rude drama, 
that where the people play the tyrant. Friend, the drama can be 
ended only in hell. Believe me, Vallier, I would give half the life 
remaining to me to pass the other half in some corner of the world 
where liberty was not a sanguinary fury. 1 

Yet the theatres, poor as were the pieces played, were 
so thronged, except indeed on the day of the King's execu- 
tion, when they were nearly empty, that Blanc, the observer 
before mentioned, expressed vexation, as we have seen, at 
frivolous amusements going on when the country was in 
danger. Nor were other diversions lacking. Bull-fights 
had been laudably put down by mayor Bailly in August 
1790 as brutalising, and an attempt to revive them at Belle- 
ville, just outside Paris, in the following May, was de- 
nounced and apparently frustrated. Not till 1797 were these 
barbarous spectacles again allowed. Republican had, how- 
ever, superseded Catholic festivals, and Perriere, on hearing 
the " Marseillaise " sung by young women at a concert 
in the Tuileries gardens in June 1793, was reminded of the 
charming girls whom he had heard singing in dissenting 
chapels in England. " There was not one of those angels," 
he says, " whom I should not have desired to marry." 2 
The republican festivals, the chief of them organised in 
Paris by the painter David, whose head was full of classical 
scenes, seem to us very factitious, and after a time they 
unquestionably fell flat ; but while the novelty lasted, I 
cannot doubt that they enchanted the Parisians. Decora- 
tions of foliage, the altar of the country on the Champ de 

1 Campenon, Mimoire de Ducis. 2 Schmidt, Tableaux, ii. 14. 



LIFE IN PARIS 261 

Mars, symbolical figures, symphonies, processions, athletic 
sports, wreaths awarded as prizes by maidens or old men, 
invocations to Nature read off from manuscript, funeral 
pyres of aristocratic emblems, Robespierre setting fire at 
the festival of the Supreme Being to figures representing 
atheism, ambition, selfishness, and discord — all this, we may 
depend upon it, aroused a good deal of fervour, 1 and Bacon 
tells how, on the 30th December 1793, citizens from the 
Arsenal quarter, on returning from the Champ de Mars, 
found in the street tables laden with provisions of which 
their neighbours pressed them to partake. 2 The liberation 
of pigeons as a symbol of the enfranchisement of the 
people, or the flight of small balloons bearing republican 
placards, seems to have pleased the multitude. We shrug 
our shoulders at this aping of antiquity, but it was the 
fashion of the day, and the eloquence which now sounds 
hollow or turgid was then very effective. The " Marseil- 
laise," moreover, has remained the national song, though its 
author, arrested by the Public Safety Committee on the 
6th January 1794, soon became disillusioned with the 
Revolution. The other songs of the period, it is true, have 
perished, and the Terror first imprisoned and then guillo- 
tined the two men who might have been its poets — Andr<£ 
Chenier and Roucher ; yet General d'Andign6, in his 
recently published memoirs, speaks of the enthusiasm pro- 
duced by warlike songs as contrasted with the previous 
indifference for music. 

The shows in the Champs Elysees, though so near the 
daily butcheries, remained open throughout the Terror, but 
in Punch and Judy guillotining was substituted for hanging. 
(Toy guillotines were also sold.) The season, too, was 
favourable for outdoor amusements. The winter of 1793 
was mild. There were no severe frosts in January 1794 ; 
February was almost exempt from frost, and spring set in 
early. Danton was tried on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th 
April, and we learn that his thundering voice could be 
heard on the quays from the open windows of the court. 

1 Drumont, Fetes Nationales, 1879. 2 F. 7, 3688. 



262 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The windows must have been open not merely because the 
court was crowded, but because the thermometer was 
high. The 2nd was cloudy, and the thermometer reached 
59 Fahr. On the 3rd there was frequent thunder and 
lightning amid Danton's vociferations, and the thermometer 
mounted to 67 . On the 4th the morning and afternoon 
were cloudy, the thermometer did not rise above 54 , 
and hail and rain fell in the evening. On the 5th the sky 
cleared in the evening, just as Danton and his companions 
perished, the day's highest reading being 58 . If the ele- 
ments thus seemed to sympathise with the tragedy then 
going on, they sympathised also with the festival of the 
Supreme Being, for on the 8th June, after a cloudy morn- 
ing the sky cleared, though a north wind kept the tempera- 
ture down to 62 . 1 

The fine arts, like the drama, received the impress of 
the Revolution. At the Salon of 1791 David exhibited the 
Death of Socrates, the Oath of the Horatii, and Brutus, as 
also the drawing of the Tennis Court Oath. Lafayette, 
Robespierre, Baron Trenck, and other celebrities were 
painted by some of his fellow-artists. In 1793 David was 
not an exhibitor, but he was at work on the Death of Marat, 
and he had presented the Convention with the Death of 
Lepelletier. Ducreux sent portraits of Robespierre and 
Couthon, and other painters depicted revolutionary epi- 
sodes. But these did not wholly supersede scenes of rural 
life, land- and sea-scapes, and various Biblical subjects such 
as the Holy Trinity, and Mary and Martha. Deseine, who 
was deaf and dumb, sculptured a bust of citoyenne Danton, 
"exhumed and moulded seven days after her death." 
Danton, as we know, on returning from a mission in Bel- 
gium and finding his wife dead, had insisted on obtaining a 
last look at her, 2 a proof of affection which did not, how- 
ever, prevent his marrying again in four months. The 
Salon of 1793, instead of being confined to members of 
the Academy of Arts, was thrown open to all " patriotic 

1 Abreviatew Universel, 1794. 

2 Guiffrey, Catalogues des anciens Salons. 



LIFE IN PARIS 263 

artists," and at the instance of David the jury by whom the 
prizes were awarded included a shoemaker and a gardener. 
These men seem to have had the good sense to be silent, 
but Hassenfratz and other Jacobin jurors made a grotesque 
exhibition of ignorance and prejudice. 1794 did not 
happen to be a Salon year, or it might have witnessed the 
glorification of Robespierre and of the guillotine. In 1795 
classical subjects predominated, but there were several 
prison scenes, such as a captive seeing his wife through the 
barred window, Roucher starting from St. Lazare for the 
Conciergerie (by Leroy, a fellow-prisoner), and the Sep- 
tember massacres. There was also a plan of proposed 
monuments to the victims in Monceau cemetery and in the 
Champs Elysees. 

No painter or sculptor perished by the guillotine. 
Fragonard, protected by David, was unmolested in his 
lodging at the Louvre. Not till after the fall of Robes- 
pierre, when David could no longer befriend him, did 
he retire to Grasse, in the then unfrequented Riviera, 
where he completed ten panel pictures which, originally 
ordered by Madame Dubarry, were purchased in 1898 
by Mr. Pierrepont Morgan for .£50,000. Gerard, another 
artist, was placed, through his master David, on the 
revolutionary jury. It is said he only acted twice. 
On the 4th February 1794 he wrote to Wolff, Fouquier- 
Tinville's registrar, to excuse a few days' absence on 
account of illness. Barere protected Houdon from the 
animosity of David by getting him to convert a statue 
of St. Scholastica into Philosophy meditating on the 
Revolution, or rather to change its title. 

Even picture-dealers had to be careful not to exhibit 
anti-revolutionary works. It is but fair to say that 
the licentious were also forbidden. An engraving of 
Louis XVI. holding a review led on the 8th January 
1794 to the arrest of a dealer, as being " calculated to 
corrupt the public mind." 1 One of the charges against 
Madame Dubarry was that she had collected reactionary 

1 A.D. ii.* 292. 



264 PARIS IN 1789-94 

caricatures. Under this censorship, engravings disappeared 
from the stalls on the quays, and even in 1797, as Meyer, 
a German tourist, was surprised to find, they had not 
reappeared. 

Music, however, was certainly stimulated by the Revolu- 
tion, and the output, in quantity if not in quality, was 
considerable. The " pz zra," it is true, has been traced to 
a dance tune composed by B^court, a theatrical violinist, 
Marie Antoinette herself having danced to it in 1790 ; 
but M. Constant Pierre has collected no less than 125 
revolutionary hymns, forty-nine of them still unpublished. 
Some of the authors, indeed, studiously suppressed their 
compositions when first the Empire and then the Monarchy 
had rendered them inopportune. While the Revolution 
lasted, however, according to M. Pierre, it gave rise not 
only to a multitude of airs and songs, but even to im- 
provements and inventions in musical instruments, for 
brass bands became in much greater request and were 
better organised. 

The annual exhibition of Sevres porcelain was held 
at the Louvre as usual at Christmas 1792, while the King's 
trial was going on close by ; but it seems to have been 
afterwards in abeyance. The annual distribution of Uni- 
versity prizes also went on till 1793. On the 10th August 
of that year the ceremony was presided over by Dufourny, 
who spoke of this, the first anniversary of the fall of 
royalty, as then celebrated by all Frenchmen only, but 
as destined to be celebrated next year by the whole world. 
He extolled Boucher St. Sauveur, who headed a deputation 
from the Convention, for having, being childless, adopted 
an infant. There was no further prize distribution till 
1800. 

The Academies continued to exist till the 8th August 
1793, when on the proposal of Bishop Gregoire they 
were abolished. The storm had been long threatening 
them. On the 25th August 1789 the French Academy 
had had the courage, or the rashness, to award the 
"virtue" prize to Marie Barbe Pecheux, maid-servant 



LIFE IN PARIS 265 

of Reveillon, whose paper-hanging factory was sacked by 
the mob in the previous April. This brought on it virulent 
attacks, and in 1790 Mirabeau commissioned Chamfort, 
himself a member, to indite for him a speech advocating 
its abolition. Mirabeau died before he could deliver 
the speech, but Chamfort published it, yet the Academy 
in 1792 elected him president. Five of its members, 
however, had emigrated, four others either were, or were 
about to be, imprisoned, and it had avoided attracting 
notice. The Academy of Sciences, in March 1793, tried 
to propitiate the Convention by offering it for military 
ambulances, 30,000 francs, arrears of prizes not awarded 
or unclaimed. The Academicians had previously asked 
permission to expend the money in a telescope superior 
to Herschel's, but had received no answer, and they 
did not wish it to remain longer idle when there was 
such an opportunity of utilising it. In the following 
month the Academy issued the programme of its prize 
dissertations for 1795. In May, moreover, it was author- 
ised to fill up vacancies, and its subsidy was restored, 
whereas the other Academies had been forbidden to 
elect new members and their subsidies had been stopped. 
This exceptional treatment was due to the Academy of 
Sciences having been directed to frame a new system 
of weights and measures. But in August 1793 it perished 
with its fellow Academies, and like them it contributed 
victims to the Revolution, for Lavoisier was guillotined, 
Vicq d'Azyr died from fear, and Condorcet poisoned 
himself. Chamfort also committed suicide to forestall 
the guillotine, which had struck down his colleague 
Bailly. In October 1795, under the title of National 
Institute, the Academies were revived. 

Dress did not fall under Jacobin regulations, except 
that the wearing of tricolour cockades was obligatory 
even for women, for on the 21st September 1793, after 
a scuffle between a cockade and an anti-cockade party, 
the Convention had rendered the badge compulsory, 
on pain of seven days' imprisonment for the first offence 



266 PARIS IN 1789-94 

and indefinite incarceration for the second. The famous 
bonnet rouge was never enforced. London became, and 
for some years remained, the seat of fashion for female 
dress. Mademoiselle Bertin, the great Paris milliner, 
had migrated thither, having previously burnt her 
account against Marie Antoinette, telling the searchers 
that the Queen owed her nothing. As for men, there 
were schemes, indeed, of republican costume. The 
Popular and Republican Society of Arts, headed by a 
fanatic named Bienaime, which actually petitioned the 
Convention for the burning of the pictures of e'migre 
painters at the Louvre, invited designs for a national 
costume whereby men would be healthier and more 
agile, while women would give birth to healthier infants. 
French citizens would thus also be distinguished from 
the inhabitants of nations still enslaved, and revolutionary 
heroes would be represented by the brush and the 
chisel in all the beauty and grace of nature. The Con- 
vention, too, on the 14th May 1794, invited David to 
adapt dress to republican manners. He accordingly ten 
days later submitted designs, which were ordered to be 
engraved and coloured. Twenty thousand copies of the 
civil and 60,000 of the legislative, judicial, and military 
designs were to be circulated. The civil costume con- 
sisted of tunic, trousers, laced boots, hat with feather, belt, 
and a mantle thrown over the shoulders. Twelve hundred 
francs (in assignats) was allowed to a tailor for making 
a specimen suit. Some of David's pupils paraded in this 
costume, but their example was not imitated, and the 
Thermidor reaction deprived the scheme of any chance 
of success. 

" Quand le bdtiment va, tout va " is nowadays a Paris 
maxim, and if it held good of the time of the Terror we 
should conclude that business was flourishing, for in 
February 1794 more than 150 houses were being erected. 1 
But this would be a great mistake. Wealthy foreigners no 
longer visited Paris. For twenty years, with the exception 

1 M. 665. 



LIFE IN PARIS 267 

of the short peace of Amiens, English " milords " were 
unknown, and London newspapers complacently com- 
mented on the money which thus remained at home. 
Opulent natives, moreover, had either emigrated or had 
been imprisoned. This exodus of the rich, coupled with 
increased taxation and the higher price of provisions, was 
complained of in four petitions to the King — signed by some 
hundreds of artisans, and discovered in the famous iron 
cupboard at the Tuileries — as causing want of employment 
and rendering the Revolution a disappointment. 

An affecting proof of this lack of employment is 
furnished by the application of a coach-painter in May 
1792 for the restitution of an infant taken by him to the 
foundling hospital in 1790. Business reviving, he was 
anxious to reclaim the child, and it was suggested, let us 
hope with effect, that he should be exempted from the 
regulation of payment of arrears of maintenance. 1 

Strikes were the natural result of such troubled times. 
As early as the 18th August 1789 journeymen tailors met 
on the grass-plot in front of the Louvre to demand 40 sous 
a day wages, and the prohibition of the making of new 
clothes by second-hand shops. On the same day journey- 
men hairdressers assembled in the Champs Elysees to 
insist on the abolition of register offices, which levied a 
tax on them as entrance fee. On the 29th August, 3000 
male servants out of place collected to demand the ex- 
pulsion of Savoyards as foreign competitors. In the 
following month journeymen shoemakers resolved on 
higher wages. Druggists' assistants contemplated a similar 
movement, but their meeting was prohibited. 

In November 1791 there was a strike at the national 
printing office, on account of the dismissal of eight 
compositors who had excited agitation against some 
previous dismissals. The ringleaders blew out all the 
candles — gas was yet unknown — and threatened vengeance 
against any who held aloof from the strike. A scuffle en- 
sued, and the ringleaders were prosecuted. 2 In September 

1 Tuetey, Assistance Publique, t. 3. 2 C. 177. 



268 PARIS IN 1789-94 

1793, another strike being threatened, the Convention 
decreed that compositors, wherever employed, might be 
requisitioned, that is to say, drafted into the national 
printing office. 

In 1 791 Paris contained 118,000 paupers, or above 
one-sixth of the population, and the strain of poverty was 
heightened by the fluctuation in the value of assignats. 
When first issued this paper money fell at once to 95 
per cent., and as the issue increased the depreciation 
increased also, though the Jacobins blindly attributed this, 
not to the natural force of things, but to speculators and 
conspirators. In July 1791 the assignat of 100 francs had 
fallen to 85, in March 1792 to 53, and in July 1793 to 33. 
In the autumn of 1793 it was worth only 29. The earlier 
assignats, bearing the King's effigy, were, however, less at 
a discount, because these alone, in the event of a counter- 
revolution, would, it was supposed, be recognised. In 
January 1795 the Convention, on account of this deprecia- 
tion, raised the stipends of its members from 18 francs a 
day to 36 francs. In June 1795 the 100 francs assignat was 
at 4, in August at 3, in November at 1^. In May 1796 it 
was worth only one-sixth of a franc. We may imagine 
how prices of commodities fluctuated, a pound of bread 
varying in 1796 from 40 to 150 francs, how these fluctua- 
tions impeded business, and how debtors took advantage 
of the depreciated currency till the resumption of specie 
payments in 1798, when the assignats were redeemed at 
1 per cent., and when all private debts were reduced to 
the value in coin at the time of their being contracted. 
The Moniteur, in 1796, had to ask subscribers who had 
paid 1800 francs in assignats for three months, to pay an 
extra 12 francs in coin to make up 20 francs, inasmuch as 
the 1800 were worth only 8 francs. This would almost 
make us credit stories of beggars disdaining to pick up 
bundles of assignats dropped in the streets. The OpeYa 
Comique had eleven times to alter its prices to suit these 
fluctuations. Dutard, the observer already mentioned, 
on asking a grocer on the 26th May 1793 what the 



LIFE IN PARIS 269 

market-women thought of affairs, received this answer : 
" These women are nearly all aristocrats (reactionaries) ; the 
ancien regime, the new one, or any other is immaterial to 
them ; they no longer sell anything, and they would rally 
round the first man who promised them plenty of food." 
The grocer himself was about to give up selling brandy, for 
the demand had so fallen off that in six months the price had 
dropped from 3 francs to 1 franc 80 cents. Yet General 
d'Andigne, in 1795, found the depreciation in currency 
beneficial to the masses. He could dine for 50 centimes 
in specie, and clothing was also cheap. 

Patriotic gifts, more or less compulsory, and forced 
loans, must also have occasioned considerable annoyance 
or embarrassment. In October 1789 a "patriotic tax" 
was imposed. Persons were required to give, in three 
yearly instalments, one fourth of a year's income. 
Madame Helvetius accordingly subscribed 4500 francs. 
In September 1793 a forced loan was imposed of 10 per 
cent, on incomes of 1000 francs, gradually rising to 50 
per cent, on 9000 francs, above which sum everything 
had to be surrendered, subject to 1000 francs or 1500 
francs being left for the husband's support and 1000 francs 
for his wife and for each child. The declarations of income 
which had thus to be sent in seem to have been closely 
scrutinised, corrections or additional details being some- 
times required. The Princess of Monaco on the 18th 
December 1793 reported an income of 12,000 since her 
divorce in the previous June, and she had voluntarily 
(that is, in the hope of remaining unmolested) lent the 
Republic 10,000 francs. This, as we have seen, did not 
save her from the guillotine. Madame Semonville, wife of 
the ex-ambassador at Constantinople, while a prisoner at 
the Luxembourg, made a return showing a deficit of 
15,000 francs, but "to give a fresh proof of civism and 
attachment to the Republic," she undertook if liberated to 
give within three months 1000 francs, albeit her husband was 
in an Austrian dungeon and her affairs were all in con- 
fusion. Nor was simulated sympathy with the Revolution 



270 PARIS IN 1789-94 

confined to gifts of money. Madame du Roure had 
in 1791 to consult the abbe" Edgeworth, Louis XVI.'s 
destined confessor, as to whether she could conscientiously 
assist in planting trees of liberty. He appeased her 
scruples. 1 Madame Condorcet, threatened with arrest by 
the revolutionary committee of Auteuil, just outside Paris, 
had not only to be very polite to them but to take their 
portraits. 2 Sham fishwives, moreover, forced people in the 
streets to buy bouquets and cry " Vive la nation" or even 
invaded houses for this purpose, insulting those who 
resisted this blackmail. These impostors had to be 
threatened by the municipality in August 1792 with six 
months' imprisonment as rogues and vagabonds. 

Searches for arms, flour, or specie were the order of 
the day. They were not always fruitless. On the 3rd 
January 1794 the Grenelle section discovered 37,628 francs 
in gold, concealed by one Barbier. But a man who, in 
conformity to law, had reported the possession of 30,000 
francs in specie had been murdered for the sake of 
plunder. It was thus equally dangerous to conceal and 
to avow. 3 Cellars were also searched for saltpetre, a plea 
which sometimes screened sinister intentions. But this 
was not so bad as the proposal of Collot d'Herbois on the 
17th and 18th September 1793, happily not adopted, that 
barrels of gunpowder should be placed in the cellars of 
"suspects," so as to blow them up at the first alarm. 
When Madame Linguet was arrested, on the 21st March 
1794, her houses in Paris and St. Cloud contained 1500 
bushels of potatoes, partly spoiled, a stock which rendered 
her guilty of hoarding. 4 Her husband, though imprisoned 
in the Bastille by the old monarchy, had been guillotined 
as an anti-revolutionist, partly on account of a paradoxical 
pamphlet against bread, to which he attributed all sorts of 

1 Fillon, Autographes. All this reminds us of Nero's victims, bequeathing 
him part of their property, so as to save the rest for their families from confisca- 
tion, and of those families being forced to simulate cheerfulness lest they should 
incur the same fate. 

2 Guillois, Madame de Condorcet. 3 Moniteur, xix. 129. 
4 AD. ii.* 292. 



LIFE IN PARIS 271 

evils. Gardens, too, were dug up in search of concealed 
plate. 1 

The post-office naturally did not enjoy inviolability. 
The National Archives still contain intercepted letters. 
Several are addressed by a Maria Sarah Moore, a prisoner 
in Paris, to a Mrs. Evans at Versailles, and there is men- 
tion in them of a common friend in England, Mrs. 
Thackeray. Now the famous novelist's grandmother had 
a sister married to a Peter Moore, M.P., a " nabob " who 
became his guardian and is the supposed original of his 
Colonel Newcome. Mrs. Evans may have been the wife or 
mother of John Evans, another nabob, chaplain and mer- 
chant at Madras, ultimately bishop of Bangor and arch- 
bishop of Armagh. On the 30th March 1793 General de 
Custine applied to the General Security Committee for the 
restitution of thirty-two letters addressed to Boyd and Ker, 
English bankers in Paris. That body ordered the seizure 
of all letters addressed to or by Madame de Genlis, then a 
refugee in Switzerland. It also required the post-office to 
give up to it registered (that is, money) letters whose in- 
tended recipients had been guillotined. 2 

Spite of all these discomforts and dangers, science and 
invention were not wholly dormant. The metric and 
decimal systems are inseparably associated with the Revo- 
lution. As early as the 8th May 1790 the National Assembly 
resolved on the unification of weights and measures, the 
co-operation of England being invited. When Lavoisier 
was arrested, the commission on that subject petitioned 
the Public Safety Committee for his release, that he might 
continue his labours on it. The refusal of this request was 
probably the origin of the legend of his asking, when con- 
demned, for a respite to complete experiments, and of his 
being told that the Republic had no need of savants. 
Failing release, Lavoisier was taken from prison under 
escort to his house, to select the papers required, and then 
went back to captivity. 3 Astronomer Cassini's papers were 
in like manner consulted by the commission, he being 

1 AD. ii.* 288-97. 2 Ibid. 292. 3 Ibid. 290. 



272 PARIS IN 1789-94 

taken from prison for that purpose. On the 29th January 
1792 Orelly, an ex-Benedictine, submitted a plan of a 
" compressed air " (apparently steam) flour-mill, which 
would supersede wind and water mills. This was referred 
to the Arts committee, but nothing more is heard of it. 
Again, on the 2nd December 1792, a M. Rollin proposed 
duodecimal numeration as preferable to the decimal system, 
inasmuch as it was divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, instead of 
only by 2 and 5. This idea has since occurred to many, 1 
but our ten fingers seem to have irrevocably committed us 
to the decimal notation. A universal language was sure to 
be also suggested, but it was not till November 1795, six- 
teen months after the Terror, that ex-major Maimieux 
published a system which he styled " pasigraphy," whereby 
any writing was to be intelligible in French, English, 
German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Twelve charac- 
ters and twelve rules were to enable men of these six 
nations to correspond. It was not apparently an antici- 
pation of volapuk, but rather resembled Chinese. He 
delivered lectures on this system. Destutt de Tracy 
and Abel Rernusat, at the Academy of Moral Sciences, 
pronounced it unworkable, but Maimieux held classes, and 
one of his pupils, after eight hours' instruction, showed his 
proficiency at the Lycee des Arts, which awarded Maimieux 
a medal. After 1804, when he was still teaching it, we 
hear no more of pasigraphy, but its author lived till 1820. 
He had a rival in Delormel, who on the 16th November 
1794 also presented the Convention with a scheme for a 
universal language. This was certainly an anticipation of 
volapuk, and was referred to the Education committee, 
which, however, never reported on it. 2 The alphabet con- 
sisted of ten vowels and twenty consonants, and two or 
three thousand words were to suffice for all requirements. 
It was not to supersede existing languages, but to be a 
medium of intercourse between men of all nations. There 

1 Sir Isaac Pitman experimented with it in his Phonetic Journal, devising two 
new figures for the purpose. 

2 Moniteur, xxii. 514. 



LIFE IN PARIS 273 

was also an attempt to harmonise French spelling with 
pronunciation. A fountain pen, too, was invented by 
Coulon, a stenographer, in October 1790. He claimed 
that it could be used for several hours without being 
replenished with ink, and that unlike quills it required no 
mending. He recommended it to reporters and travellers, 
several deputies had adopted it, and it could be carried in 
the pocket in an ivory or mahogany case. 1 

On the 22nd March 1792, Chappe, an engineer and 
nephew of an eminent astronomer, having perhaps picked 
up the idea from Amontons (who died 1705), submitted to 
the Convention his system of semaphore signals, the result 
of several years' labours, by which it might send a message 
to the frontier and receive an answer at the same sitting. 
The Education committee, to which this invention also 
was referred, reported successful experiments on the 26th 
July, and the Convention appointed Chappe "ingenieur- 
telegraphe." On the 29th August 1794 the recapture of 
Conde, which took place at 6 a.m., was thus announced to 
the Convention the same day. 2 But the system was more 
speedily adopted in England than in France, where Breguet 
and Betancour devised what was considered a simpler and 
cheaper plan. It was not till 1798 that Chappe was in- 
structed to construct a telegraph between Paris and Stras- 
burg, so as to convey messages in thirty-six minutes, and 
the system does not seem to have been thoroughly carried 
out till 1806, a year after his death. Messages were then 

recorded on forms headed " Telegraphie : ligne de ; 

depeche telegraphique de " At the top was a figure of 

Mercury flying, and at the foot an arm of the sea with a 
signal station on each side. 3 The illness of Fox was thus 
announced from Boulogne in that year. William Playfair 
claimed to have introduced the system into England, 
having heard it described by a French imigri at Frankfort 
in 1793 ; but Richard Lovell Edgeworth had some years 
previously, without knowledge of Chappe, devised a similar 
method. Seguin invented an expeditious system of tanning, 

1 Moniteur, vi. 140, 532. 2 Ibid. xxi. 632. 8 AF. iv. 1673. 

S 



274 PARIS IN 1789-94 

supplied the army with saddles, and unlike most inventors 
acquired a fortune, which he lived to enjoy till 1835, when 
he died, a septuagenarian. Bazin, a Paris tradesman, 
announced in December 1792 a process of weaving stock- 
ings without joinings, though a rival disputed both its 
originality and its utility. 1 Barneville, in May 1794, sub- 
mitted a spinning-machine adapted to the production of 
muslin equal to Indian fabrics, and on the 27th November 
following 200,000 francs was advanced to him for starting a 
factory. 2 A new mode of fixing artificial teeth was adver- 
tised in February 1793, albeit people's heads rather than 
their teeth needed stability. The arts of war were naturally 
not neglected, and an ex-artillery captain, Forestier de 
Vereux, of Gray, conceived a scheme for doubling the 
range of cannon. 3 A balloon was employed for recon- 
noitring by the French at the battle of Fleurus in 1794. 

Some of these alleged inventions were doubtless failures, 
and others raised disputes of priority, 4 yet they show all 
the same that mechanical contrivances were not in abey- 
ance during the Terror, though its literary output fell to a 
very low ebb. But some inventors found the Revolution 
very detrimental. Nicholas Le Blanc in 1790 entered into 
a partnership with the duke of Orleans, to whom he had 
been doctor, for the fabrication at St. Denis of artificial 
soda. On Orleans's death the factory was seized, and 
though Le Blanc presented his secret to the nation on con- 
dition of remuneration he could obtain no payment from 
the Convention, Directory, or Empire, till at last in despair 
he shot himself. France now saves a milliard a year by 
his process. 

For speculators who had confidence in the return of 
settled government the Terror offered a grand opportunity. 
Between October 1790 and April 1791 there were in Paris 
334 sales of ecclesiastical property, mostly dwelling-houses 
and shops, but several churches and monasteries, that of 

1 Moniteur, vii. 195, 454. 2 Ibid. xxii. 615. s Ibid. xiii. 584. 

4 An alleged discoverer of a preventive of mildew in corn was told in the 
summer of 1 794 that he had been forestalled. 



LIFE IN PARIS 275 

the Jacobins among them, were included. The munici- 
pality had paid the State a lump sum for these properties, 
and re-sold them thus by degrees. A taper burning about 
a quarter of an hour was lit when the biddings began ; if 
the bids went on, a second taper was lighted. If the taper 
was extinguished without a further bid the lot was knocked 
down. When a taper was flickering there would be a 
scramble, several persons bidding simultaneously, so that it 
was difficult to determine priority. There was an interval 
between the extinction of one taper and the lighting of 
another, during which bids were accepted. This custom 
is not altogether obsolete. 

Roger, a future Academician, revisiting Paris after the 
Terror, speaks of the frantic speculation on the steps of the 
Palais Royal, not only in stocks, but in estates which the 
speculators had never seen, yet which sometimes in a single 
day changed hands fifteen or twenty times. Persons having 
no money bid for an estate in order to re-sell it, perhaps 
piecemeal. Sometimes, to " knock out " serious bidders, 
they made extravagant bids, and when the lot was assigned 
to them were not able to pay. Such men, however, were 
often employed as intermediaries, it being cheaper to buy 
through them than in competition with them. In July 
1791 the National Assembly issued instructions to the 
departmental authorities to refuse the bids of non-residents 
unless they paid an instalment on the spot, as also those of 
drunkards and of persons who made a bid exceeding one- 
twentieth of the previous one, for there had been instances 
of a jump of 100,000 or 200,000 francs. 1 If in the country 
there was a dispute between two bidders, the one intending 
to subdivide the estate was to have the preference. Some 
of the confiscated mansions of Paris fell into plebeian 
hands at low prices. Thus the hotel de Salm became the 
property of a hairdresser named Beauregard, who in 1798 
let it or part of it to the revived Jacobin club, which had 
been expelled from the Manege on account of a riot and 
had obtained a temporary shelter in the rue du Bac. 

1 Journal des Ventes de Biens Nationaux. 



276 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Beauregard, after some narrow escapes from justice, was 
sentenced in December 1798 to four years' imprisonment 
for selling to the State coal which did not belong to him. 
The conversion of mansions still existing into factories or 
flats dates from this period. 

Some of the purchasers of confiscated property had 
misgivings as to the security of their tenure, or qualms of 
conscience respecting the former owners. Such feelings 
were dispelled as regards ecclesiastical property by the 
Concordat, which recognised the validity of the new titles, 1 
just as the Papacy, in similar circumstances, recognised in 
Mary's reign the confiscations of Henry VIII.; but un- 
easiness respecting secular property was not entirely 
dispelled, and impaired the market value till a milliard com- 
pensation was voted after the Restoration to the despoiled 
families. General Beurnonville, indeed, who had received 
the h6tel de Sabran, between the Iilyse^e and the British 
embassy, in payment of a debt of 83,000 francs — it was, or 
had been, worth 350,000 francs — gave the marquise de 
Boufflers 40,000 francs as conscience money. It was very 
meagre compensation, but she had no legal claim. The 
marquis de Miramon was also offered partial compen- 
sation, but by haggling he lost his chance, for this gave the 
new owner's fears of dispossession time to subside. Yet 
the confiscation of aristocratic, monastic, and corporate 
property, by the creation of a mass of owners, large and 
small, free from all feudal burdens, ultimately strengthened 
the notion of private property. Land in the vicinity of 
Paris or large towns was largely bought, indeed, by trades- 
men, who hired labourers or let it to farmers; but rural 
estates were mostly purchased by peasants, who combined 
to buy them in a lump and then to divide them. 2 

Many pictures, sculptures, and rare books went to 
England, Germany, and Switzerland. An influx of Jew 
brokers made a harvest by these sales, especially as 

1 Some of the purchasers at nominal prices of confiscated religious or secular 
property were nevertheless ill at ease, and in 1803, by advice of their priests, made 
donations to hospitals by way of restitution. 

8 Sagnac, Legislation Civile de la Riv. Franc. 



LIFE IN PARIS 277 

auctioneers were sometimes in collusion with them, so that 
the volumes of a valuable work or even a telescope and its 
lens were lotted separately. In 1792 the Flemish and 
German pictures of the duke of Orleans were purchased 
for 350,000 francs by T. M. Slade, a connoisseur, not with- 
out some opposition from creditors nor without protests 
from artists and connoisseurs. Slade re-sold them in 
London, when Lord Kinnaird gave 2000 guineas for 
Rubens's " Judgment of Paris," now in the National Gallery. 
Laborde-MeYeVille, who had re-purchased from a Brussels 
banker the duke's French and Italian collections, eventu- 
ally being himself ruined, carried them also to London, 
where Lords Bridgewater, Carlisle, and Gower gave ^41,000 
for them, keeping some and re-selling the rest in 1798-99. 1 
James Payne, too, the London bookseller, in 1793 purchased 
the valuable library of Chancellor Lamoignon, and he con- 
tinued to enrich the Spencer and other libraries with 
Parisian spoils. The Convention too late, in March 1794, 
prohibited the exportation of rare books and manuscripts. 

Cellars of costly wine, the confiscated property of 
emigres, or of persons guillotined, were sold for a mere 
song, not however till the commissaries who inventoried 
them had assuaged their thirst. Cobblers, as Mercier tells 
us, quaffed Maraschino, while its former owners, in the 
depths of Germany, thought themselves fortunate if with 
wry faces they could get sour beer. " It is the right of the 
victors to clink their glasses to the victory." The mob, 
moreover, had caroused on the capture of the Tuileries, 
broken bottles for a fortnight covering the adjoining 
gardens. About thirty men were arrested for stealing wine, 
clothes, or ornaments from the Tuileries. 

Fortunes were acquired not only by speculations in house 
property — two young men, Pyot and Conceil, in eighteen 
months made purchases to the amount of 17,200 francs — 
but by army contracts. Several fraudulent contractors 
were guillotined, but more doubtless enjoyed impunity. 
Shoes were sometimes made of wood or cardboard instead 

1 Buchanan, " Memoirs of Painting." 



278 PARIS IN 1789-94 

of leather. A specimen was shown to the Convention on 
the 27th September 1793 by young men ready to join the 
army if they were but properly equipped. 

Criminals could not be expected to miss the opportunity 
offered by the disorganisation of all authority. In October 
1789 the Hotel de Ville was broken into, and what money 
it contained abstracted. In November 1789 St. Etienne 
du Mont was robbed of its sacramental plate, and the 
municipality, to show its horror of the sacrilege, attended 
an expiation service. In the following year 438 persons 
were lodged in the Chatelet for crimes and 52 for frauds ; 
in 1791 the numbers were 1192 and 6. 1 On the 16th 
September 1792 there was the famous robbery of the 
Crown jewels at the Garde-Meuble (now the Ministry of 
Marine). Most of the plunder was recovered through a 
prisoner reporting a conversation which he had overheard 
between the delinquents, while they were in custody for 
another offence. The Pitt or Regent diamond was not, 
however, recovered till the 9th December 1793. The 
passing of forged assignats was a frequent offence, and in 
1791 these were actually fabricated by prisoners at the 
Chatelet. We may easily imagine that illiterate people 
unaccustomed to paper money were an easy prey. Rob- 
beries in the streets, from shop-stalls, and in houses also 
occurred, though we have no statistics to show whether 
these were more numerous than before the Revolution. 
An inmate of the Deaf and Dumb asylum had something 
stolen from him, and he surprised the court by his clear 
written account of the transaction, the thief being arrested. 
Another inmate was unfortunately addicted to systematic 
pilfering from his comrades, selling their clothes and other 
belongings. He was prosecuted, as also the receivers, but 
the latter were dismissed. The abbe Sicard, head of the 
asylum, pleaded for the boy, who, though fifteen years of 
age, was held irresponsible, but was sent to prison for a 
year. In December 1792 two men who stole a purse at a 
meeting of the Mauconseil section were sentenced to four 

1 Gazette des Nouveaux Tribunaux. 



LIFE IN PARIS 279 

years' imprisoment, and one of them to exposure in the 
pillory. 

A new form of swindling arose out of the popular belief 
that victims or emigres had concealed their treasures. We 
should not, however, have expected a prison to be the 
scene of such operations, yet in the winter of 1792 a dozen 
criminals of Bicetre made in three months 10,000 francs 
by sending out circulars. They professed to be old 
servants of Bertier and Foulon, massacred in 1789, or 
confidants of the butchered princesse de Lamballe, and 
they offered for a consideration to discover the victims' 
hidden treasures. The bait took, and the fraud had to be 
stopped by restrictions on prison correspondence. 1 At the 
same period there were complaints of numerous trunks, 
containing from 15,000 to 60,000 francs, being abstracted 
from the back of carriages and coaches, especially after 
dark. 

" Even in the most frightful times," says Droz, an eye- 
witness of the Terror, " I saw only a small number of 
malicious men, but I saw multitudes of cowards. Few 
commit crimes, but many allow them to be committed." 
" Revolutions," he adds, " are an inevitable school of 
selfishness." Let us rather say that they bring out all the 
latent good and evil in human nature. Delation was 
erected into a virtue. In 1789, indeed, the Investigation 
committee of the municipality complained of reluctance to 
denounce anti-revolutionary plots. Such reluctance, they 
said, was natural under the old regime, when it would have 
led to injustice, but was improper now that a fair trial 
would result. The infamous Laflotte, an aristocrat and 
ex-ambassador, could have indulged in no such sophistry 
when in 1794 his denunciation of the pretended plot 
among his fellow-prisoners at the Luxembourg led to 150 
executions. An inmate of St. Lazare denounced a fellow- 
captive's plan of escape. Servants were invited or even 
required to inform against their masters. Reine Millot, 
kitchenmaid at Versailles, was one of the witnesses against 

1 Tuetey, Assistance Publique, t. 3. 



280 PARIS IN 1789-94 

her royal mistress. She actually related that the Queen 
intended (at the beginning of the Revolution) to shoot the 
duke of Orleans, that the King consequently had her 
searched, and that, two pistols being found on her, he 
confined her to her own rooms for a fortnight. Three 
maidservants at the Tuileries in June 1791, named 
Rochereuil (mother and daughter) and Padelin, claimed 
to have facilitated the recapture of the royal family at 
Varennes, and having consequently been dismissed from 
their posts, they in December 1792 applied to the Con- 
vention for compensation. In June 1794 the servants of 
d'Argenson and Victor de Broglie were interrogated by 
order of the General Security Committee on the where- 
abouts of their masters. Broglie was ultimately guillotined; 
d'Argenson married his widow. Anti-revolutionary talk 
was reported by workmen employed in painting a house, 
or by seamstresses or charwomen who denounced their 
employers. Roland's launderer, as we have seen, 1 was 
questioned as to his place of concealment, but pleaded 
ignorance. A citizen went to the Pantheon section and 
suggested that Roland's servants should be questioned on 
his table talk, and that citoyenne Mignot, his daughter's 
governess, " an excellent patriot," should be asked, " mildly 
and with appeal to her civism," what she knew of the 
horrible Girondin plot. She was also to be asked whether 
Brissot did not one day announce the raising of the siege 
of Lille, at which all Roland's guests were dismayed ; and 
whether Roland did not say that if Brittany were ceded to 
England, and Artois and Lorraine to the German emperor, 
all would go well and the sans-culottes would be silenced. 
The nursemaid, suggested the citizen, might also be asked 
whether Roland was not to be king, and whether she did 
not regard mademoiselle Eudore as the daughter of the 
future king. The result was that Marie Madeleine Mignot, 
aged 55, was the first witness at Madame Roland's 
trial, but she was apparently a reluctant witness, and did 
not say quite as much as had been anticipated. She 

1 See p. 178. 



LIFE IN PARIS 281 

remembered that Brissot announced the raising of the 
siege of Lille, whereupon Madame Roland said, " We have 
heard the good news." Roland and his wife showed little 
confidence in her political opinions (good reason why), 
and spoke before her with the greatest discretion, using 
expressions which she did not comprehend. One day 
Roland said to her, " Suppose we are all three guillotined." 
She replied that, having an easy conscience, she had no 
fear of this. Roland persisting, she rejoined that anyhow 
she hoped it would be for the welfare of France. " I told 
you so," thereupon remarked Madame Roland to her 
husband. " I should not have believed it possible," was 
his response. 1 

Madame Dubarry's negro page, Zamor, whom she had 
loaded with kindness, helped to bring her to the scaffold. 
He was himself subsequently arrested at Sevres as her 
accomplice, and though released died in merited indigence 
and obscurity in 1820. The house of d'Andign6, ex-bishop 
of Chalon, was pillaged during his imprisonment by a 
nineteen years' trusted manservant, who calculated on his 
aged master's death or execution, and who ended by being 
a police spy. Andigne lived till 1806 to be over ninety. 

While Suard refused to shelter Condorcet, because he 
had been a rival suitor for Madame Suard's hand, and 
while David, the artist, basely declined to intercede for the 
life of Madame Chalgrin, Carle Vernet's sister, for whose 
hand he had been an unsuccessful suitor, there were not 
wanting persons who, like Condorcet's hostess, risked their 
own lives by concealing proscripts. Curiously enough 
what is now the lycee Condorcet was the refuge of the 
comte de Pont^coulant, whom Charlotte Corday chose for 
her counsel, but, as he was then shifting his quarters from 
night to night for fear of arrest, Fouquier's letter informing 
him of her choice did not reach him. She thought he had 
shirked the task, and her very last act was the writing of a 
reproachful letter to him. She had to ask the executioner 
to wait while she finished the letter, on receiving which a 

1 W. 294. 



282 PARIS IN 1789-94 

few days later he explained in the newspapers what had 
occurred. A Madame Lejay, widow of a bookseller, 
sheltered Pontecoulant, though a stranger to her, in the 
ex-Capucin monastery in the rue Caumartin. The chapel 
had been turned into a printing office, where deputies and 
members of the Jacobin club printed their orations. A 
manservant was the only person who shared the secret, 
but at night, when the compositors had left, Pontecoulant 
had the run of the premises and could promenade for his 
health. His retreat was only separated by a partition 
from the overseer's office, where deputies came to read 
their proofs, and one day he overheard a warm dis- 
cussion between Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Barere. 
Desmoulins remonstrated against the continued pro- 
scriptions. Robespierre angrily justified them, denounced 
those Girondins who had evaded arrest, and mentioned 
Pontecoulant as probably among his friends in Calvados, 
where he ought to be searched for, and if not discovered 
his father ought to be arrested as a hostage. He also 
remarked that he had frequently met Dumont on the 
premises, and asked whether Madame Lejay could be 
trusted. Barere suggested that Dumont was in love with 
her, but Robespierre thought him too serious for this, and 
said he should be watched. The conversation ended by 
Robespierre taking up his proof and asking advice on 
particular phrases. 1 Now Dumont had found this refuge 
for Pontecoulant, whom he had himself previously 
sheltered, and he used to go at nights to see him. This 
conversation induced Pontecoulant to quit such dangerous 
premises, and Madame Lejay arranged for him to leave 
in artisan dress with the faithful manservant. The latter 
took him to the section, introduced him as a compositor 
wanting to go into the country for his health, and thus 
got a passport vised, so that Pontecoulant escaped to 
Switzerland. He eventually returned and married his 
benefactress, who, it is said, had been the mistress of 
Mirabeau. 

1 Pontecoulant, Souvenirs. 



LIFE IN PARIS 283 

Duquesnoy, another Girondin deputy, probably owed 
his life to the gendarme who, escorting him in custody from 
Nancy to Paris, burnt the papers which he had been com- 
missioned to deliver along with his prisoner, and conducted 
the latter to La Force, then the prison for thieves and 
vagabonds. "The game preserved there," said the gen- 
darme, "is not now hunted down." 

The concierge of the Hotel des Fermes not only saved 
Mollien, the future minister, from being sent off to the 
Conciergerie with the revenue farmers, 1 but showed him a 
door in a dark passage by which, if again threatened with 
removal, he could escape. He also refused to give up to 
the usher of the Revolutionary Tribunal, on the plea of a 
discrepancy in the spelling of the name, a man inscribed 
on the fatal list. 

Nor let us forget the several hundred men and women 
who, on the royal family being brought back from Varennes, 
publicly offered themselves as hostages, in order that the 
King and Queen might cease to be treated as captives. 
True, the offer was not accepted ; it was none the less 
generous. 

The records of the Revolutionary Tribunal show nume- 
rous acts of heroism. There is Duchastel, the deputy who, 
ill, went in his nightcap to the Convention to vote against 
the execution of Louis XVI., and who, questioned on this 
at his trial, intrepidly replied, " Not having to blush for any 
of my acts, I declare that it was I who thus voted." There 
is Augran d'Alleray, councillor of State, seventy-nine years 
of age, who, advised by Fouquier-Tinville, his former subor- 
dinate, to deny having sent money to his emigre son-in-law, 
refused to purchase life by a falsehood. There is Malesherbes, 
who, safe in Switzerland, hurried back to Paris to defend 
his royal master at the bar of the Convention, and after- 
wards offered to defend the Queen, though conscious that 

1 Their arrest is attributed to Gaudot, a Paris collector, whom they had dis- 
missed for dishonesty. In order to destroy the proofs of his guilt, he professed to 
make revelations against them, and was consequently allowed access to their 
papers. 



284 PARIS IN 1789-94 

his own fate was thus sealed. His daughter, his grand- 
daughter, and her husband perished with him. What a 
contrast between this veteran of 72 and Target, who, 
though only 54, pretended that he was too old to under- 
take Louis's defence. I notice, moreover, that while Tron- 
chet and de Seze, who acted with Malesherbes, adopted in 
their letters to the Convention the absurd term of " Louis 
Capet," Malesherbes styles his royal client simply Louis. 1 
King he could not, Capet he would not, say. There is the 
Irish abbe Edgeworth, who when he accompanied his royal 
penitent to the scaffold, fully expected to be torn to pieces 
by the mob. There is Henriette Cannet, who, a childless 
widow, 2 wished to exchange clothes with her friend of girl- 
hood days, Madame Roland, so that the latter might escape 
from prison and devote her life to her husband and child. 
There is Madame Lavergne, who, resolved to share the 
fate of her husband, startled the Revolutionary Tribunal by 
crying " Vive le roi!" Nor were these the only women who 
courted death so as to accompany or rejoin a beloved one. 
When Tardieu de Maleissye, his wife, and younger daughter 
were summoned to the Conciergerie for trial, the elder 
daughter, Madame Dubois de Berenger, whose husband 
had emigrated, was in consternation at being left behind ; 
but how great her delight at finding that she, too, was 
on the fatal list ! " Mother," she exclaimed, " we shall 
all die together." Yet it seems that she had a child, or 
children, for whose sake she might have desired to live. 
Claviere's wife, on hearing of her husband's suicide when 
condemned with the Girondins, also destroyed herself. 
Madame Costard, mistress of Pascal Boyer, journalist of 
Nimes, on his being condemned, wrote a vehemently 
royalist letter to Fouquier, thus thrusting herself on the 
guillotine. " I cannot live without Boyer," she said, " and I 
cannot live under a government like yours, where we see 
nothing but massacre and pillage." She signed the letter 
literally with her blood. This victim of the age of 25, it 

1 C. 243. 2 She died in 1838, aged 89. See p. 308. 



LIFE IN PARIS 285 

should be added, had a husband as well as a paramour. 
Another mistress, if we are to credit Legonve, witnessed her 
lover's, execution, followed the cart to the cemetery, by 
a bribe of 100 louis obtained his head, and was walking 
home with it concealed under her dress when she fainted, 
whereupon the head rolled on the ground, and she was 
arrested and executed. And at Lyons Legonve" tells us of a 
young woman who begged to be shot with her brother, the 
only survivor of the fusillades, and on being repelled threw 
herself into the Rhone. 1 So steeped in Plutarch were 
Frenchwomen of that time. 

Then there is Admiral Kersaint, who after voting for the 
imprisonment of Louis XVI. till the peace in lieu of death, 
resigned his seat in the Convention rather than be the 
colleague of a Marat who had publicly demanded 200,000 
heads. There is Benoit Leduc, who on the morning of the 
King's execution asked, though vainly, for the body, that 
he might lay it beside the father's at Sens. There is 
General Loiserolles, a prisoner at St. Lazare, who on the 
7th Thermidor answered the fatal roll-call in lieu of his 
son, said to be asleep at the time, and next day was guillo- 
tined, the registrar of the tribunal simply substituting Jean 
for Frangois, and 61 for 22 as the age. 2 Well might he 
have remarked in prison that the members of the Conven- 
tion spoke like apostles but acted like cannibals. There is 
Delphine de Custine, of whom we shall hear again, who 
vainly urged her husband to exchange clothes with her 
that he might escape from prison. She would have then 
put on the dress of the jailor's daughter, who was quite 
ready to take the chance of herself escaping, or of being 
guillotined. There is the unknown woman, who, when 
Madame de Custine was threatened by a furious mob on 
leaving the court where her father-in-law was being tried, 
lent her her infant, a burden which protected her from 
maltreatment until, quit of the mob, she could hand the 
infant back to its mother, the two women parting without 

1 Le Merite des Femmes, 1800. 2 Moniteur, xxii. 561. 



286 PARIS IN 1789-94 

having exchanged a syllable. There are also humble 
women who cheerfully forfeited their lives for sheltering 
recusant priests or attending clandestine masses. And 
how many devoted retainers and faithful friends there must 
have been who imperilled or sacrificed themselves without 
a thought of the fame which helped to sustain a Roland or 
a Corday. 



CHAPTER VII 

AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 

A Courtship at Nantes : Villenave and Miss Tasset — Madame Roland's 
Letters to Buzot — Emigres and their wives or mistresses — The 
poet Roucher to his daughter. 

We have seen that so far from the Revolution absorbing 
every thought and disquieting every mind, life, except indeed 
among the aristocracy, went on very much as before. 
Love was no exception, and it is interesting to see how the 
social influence of Rousseau, whose political influence had 
been so powerful, continued to act even on those who had 
reason to detest his political theories. While Robespierre 
was his avowed disciple, and while Marat had all his defects 
minus his genius, there were many men and women in the 
upper and middle class for whom the Nouvelle Heloise was a 
gospel and St. Preux and Julia were models. And here we 
are not dependent on memoirs more or less falsified by 
lapse of memory or love of embellishment, nor on deline- 
ators of manners, who are apt to view everything through 
preconceived theories. We have authentic letters, trust- 
worthy because never designed for publication, which 
depict love in its various forms, but all or nearly all a la 
Rousseau. 

We may begin with a courtship. Let us go to Nantes at 
the beginning of 1792, when, though the King was a virtual 
prisoner at the Tuileries, though the emigrant nobles were 
busy at Coblentz, though Austria and Prussia were medi- 
tating an invasion, there was a political lull, so that most 
people imagined the worst storms of the Revolution to be 
over. 

At Nantes, a town then containing 70,000 inhabitants, 

there had settled in 1786 a retired musician named Joseph 

287 



288 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Tasset. Born at Chartres in 1732, the son of an expert 
wood-carver who made flutes, Tasset, at six years of age, 
gave lessons on the flute ; at sixteen he held public per- 
formances ; and he shortly afterwards went to England,, 
where he had aristocratic pupils, such as the Duchess of 
Hamilton, latterly Duchess of Argyll, one of the " beautiful; 
Miss Gunnings." He knew Sterne, and Handel applauded 
his invention of a flute with eighteen keys. He was consi- 
dered the prince of flute-players, excelled in Scotch airs, and, 
composed several sonatas. He figures in some musical 
encyclopaedias as an Englishman, his name misspelt TaceU 
He had retired on a competency, with an English wife, 
who died about 1788, and an only child, Jeanne Marianne,, 
born in London, probably about 1766. The Tassets lived 
in the Cours St. Andre> one of the avenues covering the site 
of the old fortifications. Nantes houses were not then, 
crowded together as they are now, and there was a back- 
garden in which the widower, well-meaning but reserved, 
and rather difficult to please, loved to saunter in his dress- 
ing gown, sometimes deaf to the dinner-bell, so that 
Marianne had to despatch her English maid to repeat the- 
summons. 

Tasset seems to have had sisters living in the town, 
which probably accounts for his settling there, and there 
were a few English residents, with whom Marianne may 
have been acquainted ; but she had apparently little society ^ 
and her father had none of the qualities of a confidant*. 
Although she could speak English and was considered 
English, French, after six years' absence from England,, 
was the language most familiar to her. She had inherited 
her father's taste for music, but had no special talent for it ;, 
she kept a parrot and singing birds, painted a little, and 
read much, her favourite authors being Rousseau and 
Richardson. Albeit void of pretensions to beauty, she had 
had several offers of marriage ; but if she was still single at. 
an age when most young women were wives and mothers, 
it was because the only man she had really loved had died, 
and because she had never met another really in love with. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 289 

her. Steeped in Rousseau, she would have liked a grand 
passion, but failing this, she had half accepted a fellow 
townsman, a M. de Blancard, 23 years of age, and of a 
highly respectable family. But fate willed otherwise. 

She had a bosom friend, Melanie Muller, apparently of 
Alsatian or German extraction, who had gone from Nantes, 
as companion or nursery-governess, to the Chateau of 
Courteilles, near Verneuil, 200 miles to the north-east. 
The mansion had been built in 1760 by Jacques de Barbarie, 
marquis de Courteilles, and it was now occupied by four 
generations, all women and children, a state of matters not 
unusual with chateaux during the Revolution. There was 
the widowed marquise de Courteilles, probably 70 years 
of age, and her step-daughter, the comtesse de Roche- 
chouart, also a widow, for the count, one of the first 
nobles to join the National Assembly, had died in July 
1791. He had made it a condition, on marrying his 
daughters, that they should remain in the nest. Accord- 
ingly there were two daughters, the duchesse Rosalie de 
Richelieu, wife of the grandson of the notorious roue, 
marshal Richelieu, and the princesse de Carency. Both 
were grass-widows, for Richelieu, married at fifteen years of 
age to a hump-backed girl of twelve, started the same day 
with his tutor on a tour, and never cohabited with his 
wife, while on the outbreak of the Revolution he went 
to Germany and thence to Russia. He returned to France 
after Waterloo, and became prime minister. As to Carency, 
he was perhaps with his father, the due de la Vauguyon, 
French ambassador at Madrid, or he may have been 
already a black sheep, for in the Terror he was one of the 
infamous men known as moutons, prisoners who informed 
against their fellow-captives. Lastly, there were the two 
young sons of a third and eldest daughter, Melanie, who 
had died in 1790, and whose husband, the due de Piennes, 
afterwards due d'Aumont, thereupon married to a woman 
who had long been his mistress, was in disgrace. The two 
boys, Ernest, ten years old, who eventually joined his uncle 
Richelieu in Russia, and was killed in Persia in 1805, and 

T 



290 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Zosime, his junior, obviously required a tutor. Moreover, 
the four ladies, who had been intimate with madame 
de Stael in Paris, were doubtless in need of a person of 
the other sex to protect them from revolutionary annoy- 
ances. 

That tutor and protector, apparently recommended by 
Roberts, a professor of English in Paris, 1 was Mathieu Guil- 
laume Villenave. Born in Languedoc in 1762, the son of a 
doctor, Villenave was tonsured at nine, that he might have 
a family benefice ; but resigning this at twenty-one to a 
younger brother, he repaired to Paris, with the idea of 
entering the king's life guards. Finding, however, that two 
years' probation without pay was required, he obtained 
through the abbe Ricard — Ricard, the future translator of 
Plutarch, had, since the father's death in 1772, interested 
himself in the Villenave family — a tutorship to the comte 
de Pontgibaud. Like many other tutors, he retained the 
clerical garb, and the title of abbe, but was a sort of hybrid, 
not irrevocably committed to the priesthood. In 1786 he 
unsuccessfully competed for an Academy prize, the subject 
being an ode on the duke of Brunswick's rescue of a man 
from drowning in an inundation of the Oder. He obtained 
an introduction to Marie Antoinette, and had hopes of 
becoming tutor to the Dauphin when the Revolution broke 
out. Enraptured with it, he threw off his frock and started 
a newspaper at Paris, and on the day of the famous Tennis 
Court sitting, he went about Versailles telling the deputies 
whom he met where to assemble. But journalism did not 
flourish with him, and he had to resume teaching. He 
accompanied the Courteilles family to their chateau. A true 
southerner, he was fervid and impulsive. Before leaving 
home — whither he never returned, though his mother was 
living as late as 1797 — he had been in love with a novice in 
a convent ; he had since had two other attachments, and 
he was now half engaged to a Mademoiselle Desroziers. 
He had naturally much conversation with Melanie Muller, 

1 By whose lessons 'at the Military School Napoleon, [as he afterwards 
regretted, failed to profit. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 291 

who had a talent for painting, and had hopes of earning a 
livelihood, or even fame, by her brush. It would seem that 
she declined his overtures, but imagined that he would be 
a suitable husband for Marianne Tasset. She accordingly 
showed him Marianne's letters and her portrait. The 
letters made more impression than the portrait, which did 
not argue beauty. Villenave also was a disciple of 
Rousseau, and sighed for a romantic passion. It was not 
love at first sight, but love without sight. Early in January 
1792 he wrote to " Miss Tasset," as she was styled, and 
within three months sixteen letters were exchanged. These, 
with the exception of the first, have been preserved, and 
were probably sold with Villenave's autographs and other 
manuscripts in 1856. They are now the property of M. 
Frederic Masson, and were published, but without any eluci- 
dations, in the Revue Retrospective, in 1890. After the lapse of 
a hundred years these love letters have not lost their aroma, 
but they are too bulky to give in full, and to summarise 
them would be like crushing a butterfly or a rose. Extracts 
must therefore suffice. Let me premise that religion and 
politics are equally conspicuous by their absence. Nomin- 
ally Catholics, both parties were evidently of the creed of 
Rousseau, and Marianne was no politician, but Villenave's 
total silence on passing events is surprising, considering 
that he had already dabbled in politics, and was destined to 
burn his fingers in that then dangerous game. 

On the nth January, Marianne writes to Melanie : — 

I have received M. de Villenave's letter. I should like, and I 
ought, to reply, but cannot. Apologise to him for me, dear 
Melanie. Tell him that imperative circumstances do not allow 
me at this moment to give him a reply, which I shall soon have 
the pleasure of writing to him, that I could not do so just now in 
a way satisfactory to my delicacy, that I should be afraid of mis- 
leading him and deceiving myself, that I wish to be open and 
straightforward with him, as I desire him to be with me, and that 
if it is really true that my dear Melanie's praises have kindled in 
his heart sentiments of which I am too little deserving to be able 
to believe in them, I shall endeavour, even while seeking to destroy 
them, to preserve his esteem. 



292 PARIS IN 1789-94 

She goes on to explain that she has an admirer who had 
lost his situation by outstaying his holiday for her sake, 
and that she is dependent on her father. She asks whether 
Villenave, if he marries, will retain his present post, 
whether his pupils' education is nearly completed, whether 
if forced to leave he can find another situation, or an 
employment respectable and lucrative enough to spare 
her father the suspicion of mercenary motives, and herself 
the vexation of seeing her husband dependent on her 
father. She adds : — 

If M. de Villenave can reply satisfactorily to all these questions, 
if he can really succeed in persuading me of the fact of an attach- 
ment which I can scarcely comprehend, if finally I can succeed in 
reconciling my inclinations with my duties, I will then tell him 
all that my heart and circumstances may permit me to say. 

Six days later she writes again to Melanie : — 

If you knew all that I have undergone since replying to M. de 
Villenave's letter, the cruel days, the sad nights, which I have 
passed, the fearful uncertainty in which I am placed, you would 
pity, oh ! you would greatly pity me. . . . Melanie, I confess that 
his letter surprised me to a degree I cannot express. You read it, 
you are consequently better able to judge than I, especially as you 
know the writer. Tell me candidly, do you think he loves me ? So 
strange, so romantic, an attachment, is it natural? Do you not 
discern some motive which may induce him to feign what he 
perhaps does not feel? For how is it that, affectionate and 
susceptible as he seems to be, he has not rather profited by the 
happy chance which you offered to his view of becoming loved by 
an object combining, with the most pleasing talents and the most 
natural mind, all the seductions that the Graces and youth can 
add ? How is it natural, in short, that he has not tried to please 
an object present, and calculated to charm whoever has eyes and 
heart, rather than to be enamoured of a plain woman who is 
200 miles off, and whom, perhaps, he would cease to love as 
soon as he saw her? 

Moreover, she remembers Melanie having told her that 
Villenave had paid her attentions, and was also in love 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 293 

with " all your duchesses." " A fickle man, ready to take 
fire at the first object presenting itself, would not at all 
do for me. He would soon kill me with love and 
jealousy." What most alarms her are his good looks, for 
how can she satisfy him ? 

How renounce the honest, estimable man to whom I am, as it 
were, pledged, and whom I may render unhappy ? Ah ! Melanie, it 
would be much better for you to love M. de Villenave and marry 
him. Your children would be little darlings, I should be fond of 
both of you, and all four of us would be happy. . . . Pray write as 
soon as possible. For you must feel how essential it is for me to 
know what to expect respecting M. de Villenave. Do not, I entreat 
you, keep me in suspense. Try and sound him as much as possible. 
Remember that the happiness of my life is at stake. 

There is an enclosure for Villenave, in which, after 
speaking of her embarrassment and hesitation, she says : — 

This preamble will perhaps surprise you, but allow me to tell 
you that the surprise will not be greater than I felt on reading your 
letter. I expected, indeed, to receive it ; I even wished for it, but 
I was scarcely prepared for its contents. Do not imagine on that 
account that it offended me ; I am frank, and will confess that the 
avowal you make, so far from angering me, would have infinitely 
flattered me if I could have ventured to believe in it. But how can 
you expect me to believe and to persuade myself that you love me ? 
Remember, sir, that you have never seen me, that you know me 
only by hearsay, that Melanie's portrait of me was sketched by a 
hand which embellishes all it touches, and that that hand was 
guided by friendship. Learn, in short, that I may have some good 
points, but that altogether I am what is called a plain woman, that 
I am probably older than you, and reflect after all this whether, 
without running a risk of passing even in your own judgment for 
extravagant, I can persuade myself that I am capable of captivating 
a man of your merit, age, and figure. I believe you like me, but I 
think you form, from the praises lavished on me by a too partial 
friend, an idea of my mind and my slender talents which would 
be much lessened if I had the honour of being known to you. 
Disabuse yourself, therefore, sir ; do not take me for an extra- 
ordinary woman, but merely for an affectionate and extremely 
susceptible one, a woman whose heart does not always let her head 



294 PARIS IN 1789-94 

reflect, a woman whose perhaps rather too lively imagination is 
ready to take fire, but never except for objects she thinks the 
worthiest of her esteem. 

After explaining that Blancard has seen Villenave's 
letters, and wishes her to see the writer before she decides 
between the two, she adds : — 

You perhaps imagine me rich ; now disabuse yourself of the 
idea. I possess something, and have expectations ; my situation is 
tolerable, but in no way brilliant. However, I think I have already 
hinted to you that I am dependent on a father who will act 
generously to me, but will not impoverish himself for my benefit, 
especially as, while allowing me to marry, I am well aware he does 
not wish it. Before arranging anything, therefore, you must be sure 
of retaining your present post or of obtaining another which would 
make up for its loss. ... In testifying a desire to know you, I 
have no thought of urging you to come to Nantes ; I feel how 
ridiculous the proposal would be, yet I cannot conceal from myself 
that that plan, assuming it possible, is the only one which can make 
us acquainted, and can consequently decide my fate. 

This letter crosses one from Villenave, dated the 19th 
January : — 

So I am under the knife of destiny. At the moment I am 
writing my fate is perhaps settled, irrevocably decreed. Oh ! Miss 
[sic in origJ], you will not be mine, and I shall never see you. Fool 
that I was ! I contrived, despite all possibilities, to fancy that it 
would be possible to convert my heart's romance into history. . . . 
Oh ! Miss, you escape me, I no longer hope for aught ; I have read 
that letter, so fatal to my tranquillity ; it is my admiration and my 
torment. All As over between you and me ; I bid you a perhaps 
eternal farewell. . . . Your heart is pre-engaged. . . . Had I gone 
to see you, you would have said to yourself: "Behold him, he is 
neither handsome nor ugly, good-looking rather than not, and tall ; 
there is nothing striking in his figure, but nothing displeasing. He 
has chestnut hair, dark eyes, good teeth ; his countenance is mild 
and open, his manner is amiable and sensible; let us make him 
talk." Then I should have said to the amiable Miss, " My mind is 
better than my person. I know that you do not think yourself 
pretty, but if you love me you will ever be so in my eyes. I have 
not come 200 miles for your face or your fortune, but I would have 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 295 

come a thousand for your good and amiable qualities." Here, Miss, 
you would have blushed, but not so much as I should. " I come 
to offer you my hand and heart. I should have preferred to enrich 
you, I can only love you." 

He proceeds to quote four lines from Pope, be- 
ginning— 

O happy state, when souls each other draw, 

which made Marianne imagine that he knew English, an 
idea which he had to correct. 

On the 30th January Villenave writes : — 

What was she (Melanie) thinking of in telling you that she had 
made a conquest of me, and that I was in love with all the ladies 
of the chateau ? Really, Miss, this puzzles me. Was it vanity, or 
merely one of those sallies made without reflection, and without 
foreseeing what may one day have vexatious consequences ? I have 
great respect for our ladies, I find them amiable and kind, but 
assuredly that is all. 

He also likes Melanie, but she is flighty, and is devoted 
to painting ; her talk of Marianne, together with the letters 
and portrait, had smitten him : — 

Do not fancy, kind and amiable Miss, that I am a frivolous, 
fickle, thoughtless young man. I am 29 ; I have loved twice in 
my life. For a long time I knew misfortune; I have felt the 
nothingness and frivolity of the world ; I have gained experience, 
tact, yet I have preserved my morals. ... I have numberless 
defects, but not one vice. . . . How flattered I feel to be able to 
call myself your ami. Your pretty hand has signed this permission. 
Oh believe, amiable Miss, that it is too much for my deserts, but 
not enough for my heart. . . . How alarmed I am at the inclina- 
tion which draws you to my rival. 1 What ! you read him my letter, 
Melanie's, and even your own. Oh, dearest Marianne, I am lost if 
you have not the courage to veil from him the secrets of your own 
heart and of mine. ... A word from your mouth and I fly to your 
feet, or I remain for ever fixed on the spot where destiny has 
prepared, matured, and decreed my misfortune. 

1 As to whom he has questioned Melanie, who, however, did not know him. 
She has also played a joke on Marianne, by sending her an Apollo Belvedere as 
Villenave's portrait. 



296 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Marianne writes to Melanie on the 5th February : — 

M. de Villenave's letter is charming ; it proves what I knew but 
too well, that he is the most amiable, the most fascinating of men, 
but it does not at all prove that he is the man destined for me, for it 
was written before mine, and does not answer any of my questions. 
Ah! Melanie, if he has received mine I am sure he has given me up. 
What man could stand such an ordeal ? He would have to love, 
to love passionately, and how could he love me? He does not 
know me. 

She asks Melanie to bring Villenave over to Nantes, and 
to make acquaintance with Blancard, who, if not an 
amiable, is a thoroughly honest man, to whom she has 
told all, as she was bound to do, for he has a chance else- 
where amply compensating him for the loss of her. 

Villenave, writing on the 12th February, says : — 

I have seen everything, read everything, your letters, your post- 
script. I hold them, I clasp them, I read them, I re-read them, 
I cover them with tears and kisses ; I am victor. Yes, yes, I enjoy 
my triumph. . . . They are mine, all your letters to Mademoiselle 
Melanie. I hold them, I keep them, she shall never have them 
back, not even your first ones, though in these there is nothing 
about me. These are my titles, my glory, thy soul, thy virtues, thy 
mind, my happiness, my triumph. No human power shall ever 
deprive me of them. . . . Beg her to leave me this precious deposit, 
it is mine for ever; the thief will give it up only at the gallows. 
And Miss Tasset's portrait, painted by herself ! more than a month 
ago it was stolen, taken by force. Oh ! that also shall never be 
restored. ... I also have made a sacrifice. A marriage that was 
offered me, a young lady, not handsome, yet pleasing, amiable, but 
not of much education, and without talent, not rich, but much richer 
than I am, a respectable family, to whom I was not displeasing. 
Well, six weeks ago I stated in the most straightforward way that 
I could no longer be reckoned upon. I had then but little hope of 
possessing Miss Tasset, but I was desiring, I was soliciting her 
hand; I would not leave an estimable family under any mistake. 
Behold, Miss, what delicacy prevented my telling you a fortnight 
ago, and what you should never have known had you refused 
me. . . . Thou wilt have to deduct much from thy friend's excessive 
praises, but I can say with Rousseau, " I do not know a better man 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 297 

than myself." Oh ! Miss, kind and sweet friend, forgive me for 
having thou'd you : I swear that this shall not happen again without 
thy permission, but I shall obtain it, shall I not? . . . Receive 
the tender kiss of love. Remember that my fault is involuntary, 
that my intoxication is thine own work, and then — dare to punish me. 

On the 1 6th February he again writes : — 

I will not await your reply, my dear Marianne — allow me this 
sweet familiarity of expression — to ask you to forgive the extra- 
vagance of my last letter. . . . You will tell me "many sins are 
remitted you because you have loved much." Then, doubt not, 
I shall with difficulty resist the temptation of becoming still more 
culpable. 

He is impatient to see her, yet has misgivings, and 
suggests that the abbe Ricard should first visit Nantes and 
speak for him : — 

I see myself 50 years hence a good old patriarch, with Marianne 
and our children, who will have learned to love tach other and us. 
Adieu, good, amiable, sensible miss* . . . Open thy sweet lips to 
the kiss of love. These kisses, which come from such a distance, are 
not bitter, like those which St. Preux received from Julia. Adieu, 
miss ; adieu, Marianne ; adieu, wife. How sweet to talk with thee, 
how painful to quit thee. 

Marianne, forgetting this time to give a date, writes : — 

You have seen my letters, you have read your own triumph and 
my weakness. I have only therefore to blush and be silent. But 
do not imagine it is with shame. Far from blushing at the feeling 
which draws me to you, I am proud of it, but I confess I would 
rather have kept you in ignorance of it till my worth could have 
taught it you. The confession, it seems to me, would have 
been sweeter for us. I should have read your happiness in your 
eyes ; I should have said, " He is happy, and I am the cause of it." 
. . . You perhaps can wait patiently. You are a man, and a 
philosopher to boot, but I, who am only a woman, that is to say a 
weak, sensitive, curious woman, / wait ? No, I can never wait above 
three weeks from to-day at most, and I shall conclude, if you do not 
come at the prescribed time, that you do not love me at all. . . . 



298 PARIS IN 1789-94 

But alas, ought I to hurry you to start? Ought I to hasten the 
moment when I shall perhaps irrevocably lose you ? For what if my 
presence lowers the veil which conceals all my imperfections from 
your eyes ? . . . I know not why, but of late I find myself much 
plainer than usual. Alas, it is perhaps because I never so much 
deserved to be handsome. . . . Fancy, not merely am I no beauty, 
but I am stout, tolerably well-shaped indeed, but not having what is 
called a slim figure ; I have a white skin, dark and rather full eyes, 
a countenance which people call expressive, and I had the finest 
hair possible, but an illness two years ago made me lose it. It 
is growing again, but is still short, and so thick that it enlarges 
rather than adorns my head. I have besides a large nose, thick lips, 
in short I am much like my portrait, but perhaps still plainer, and 
that, you know, is not handsome. ... I cannot love by halves ; the 
lover who has learned to please me ceases to be a man, he becomes 
a god who rules and governs my destiny at his will ; I live and 
breathe only through him. Remember that I shall love you as you 
have never, perhaps, been loved, but that I desire the like. Re- 
member, lastly, that I have never understood fickleness, and that 
yours would kill me. . . . My mind has made, I am sure, more 
than a hundred journeys to Courteilles. Alas, if you would hasten 
your promised journey a little, you would spare me much travelling 
and fulfil all my heart's desires. ... I hope now to get at least one 
letter a week, but beware, sir, of writing me more than three; I 
should refuse them, and to make me take them in you would have 
to bring them yourself. 

Writing to Melanie on the 17th February, Marianne 
asks whether Villenave often talks of her, whether he 
seems happy : — 

How I long for, yet dread, the moment when I can clasp you 
both to my breast, bedew you with the sweet tears of sentiment, and 
say to myself, "Behold her who will make my happiness, behold 
him to whom I owe it." 

Blancard, in a parting interview, had wished her well, 
and had asked for continued friendship and correspond- 
ence : — 

Ah, Melanie, what it costs me to afflict an honest man, and 
what would I not give never to have known that unfortunate young 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 299 

man ! I have informed my father of M. de Villenave's visit and 
sentiments. He seems disposed to receive him well, but I hear 
him sigh, though I hope M. de Villenave will convert his uneasiness 
into happiness, without which my own would not be perfect. 

On the 23rd February, Villenave writes to the abbe 
Bradt to ask him to break off negotiations in another 
quarter, for he had a more advantageous prospect, though 
still very uncertain. Nevertheless he would not run after 
two women at once, and would rather miss both than 
deceive either. It is difficult to reconcile this letter with 
what he had told Melanie on the 12th February of a 
rupture then six weeks old. Had he three strings to his 
bow ? 

On the 24th February Marianne writes : — 

my friend, I exist only the days when I hear from you, the 
rest of the week I pass in waiting and longing. I am constantly 
sending to the post, I ask everybody about the arrival of the mails, 
and I should exhaust the patience of those around me if their friend- 
ship for me did not make it inexhaustible. Yes, you love me, 
I believe it, I feel it, and I begin to flatter myself that your inclina- 
tion, springing from affinities of soul, will resist everything, even our 
first interview, and that you will love me even without beauty, 
because you will love not my face, but my heart. If my letters fell 
into the hands of some prude I should doubtless be blamed, but as 
I have never been either a prude or a coquette, and as my feelings, 
I venture to say, are as pure as my heart, I do not blush to avow 
them to him whose happiness I hope they will ensure. . . . Ah, 
I begin to believe you are he whom my heart has so long sought, he 
who should realise all the dreams of my imagination, he whom I 
once thought I had found, but whom fate made me know only 
to deprive me of him for ever. ... If you come, as I presume, 
by coach, I will send somebody to meet you. We are sorry not to 
be able to lodge you, but except at night you will be always with us. 

Villenave writes on the 27th February : — 

1 swear thou shalt be mine, mine for ever. No human power 
can prevent a union long doubtless foreseen and determined in 



300 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the inexplicable Book of Fate. Thy father will love me, because I 
shall make his daughter happy. . . . Thou art an angel. No, thou 
canst not be plain ! Ah, thou shalt never be so in my eyes. ... I 
loved for six years a plain woman because she had answered my 
first letter without coquetry and with the effusion of a heart more 
enamoured than my own. 

Three days later he writes again to say that though he 
has done with correspondence, he will bring a number of 
letters to satisfy her father of his character. " I give thee 
the tender kiss of love." 

On the 4th March Marianne writes : — 

Oh how my heart thrills at the idea of soon seeing you. . . . 
Seeing you so handsome (in his "flattered" portrait by Melanie, 
enclosed in the letter of the 27 th February), how is it possible 
not to find myself a hundred times plainer than usual? ... I was 
almost as vexed to find you as good-looking as to see myself (in 
the glass) so plain. . . . There is still time enough, make your 
reflections, spare yourself the horrors perhaps of repentance. You 
do not say whether you have a mother living, but I should be 
so glad to love and respect her. Alas that I have none. How her 
beautiful soul would rejoice at our happiness ; how she would love 
you ! But for three years she has rested in the tomb, and as long as 
I live she will be the object of my keenest regrets, just as while 
living she was that of my tenderest love. . . . The Nouvelle Hkloise 
is for me the first of romances, Julia the first of women, and St. 
Preux the model of lovers. I know no hero in Richardson to 
compare with him. Clarissa, charming and interesting as she is, 
does not affect me, with her grand virtues, as much as Julia, tender 
Julia, even with her failings. . . . Should I not look for a room in 
the neighbourhood, as near us as possible ? . . . Adieu, then, I leave 
you, but only to think of you, to look at your portrait, to read 
your letters, to applaud my choice, to bless her to whom I owe 
the happiness of again loving, in short, to busy myself only with you 
and with the moment when I shall enjoy the inexpressible happiness 
of seeing you, and hearing you ask me for the first time, " Dost thou 
love me ? " — charming question, to which I shall eagerly reply, " H,ow 
I love thee." 1 

1 Here she for once uses the second person singular. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 301 

On the 8th, she writes again : — 

Your letter is charming, adorable. You write like an angel, I 
should say like a god, but that it is dated Courteilles. That date pains 
me, and you know that the gods never give pain. My imagination 
still depicts your arrival with Melanie. She enters first, I rush into 
her arms, but while embracing her, I look for you, I discover you at 
last, and I rush to clasp you too in turn to my heart throbbing with 
pleasure. My beloved, I am so full of this idea that frequently on 
hearing the bell, and seeing the door open, I involuntarily tremble 
and fancy it is you. 

She goes on to speak of an intimate friend who had 
ridiculed the notion of love without sight. She hopes 
Villenave is fond of music, and not fond of the chase. 

Villenave, unaccompanied by MeUanie, has to go first to 
Paris, whence he writes on the nth March, on the eve of 
starting — 

Oh, my beloved, in three days I shall be at thy feet, on thy neck, 
at thy side. ... I arrive pale, cramped, my hair untrimmed, dirty, 
crumpled, looking like a shop Adonis. I shall, however, if I can, 
spare my dear Melanie the imposing view of my head buried in a 
large dirty cotton cap. Ah, if I had more vanity than love, I should 
not see Marianne till the day after my arrival, but even if I had just 
emerged from a bog I do not know whether I should be courageous 
enough to delay by one hour that first so ardently desired inter- 
view. 

Writing again from Mans, on Friday the 16th, he 
says : — 

Dining takes a long time, and we sleep at an inn every other 
night, so that though we set off this morning at 3, we have done 
only 40 miles. We shall reach Nantes on Sunday evening, perhaps 
at 6, perhaps at 10. . . . Twenty-four hours must still elapse before 
I see my beloved. Oh, how slowly the time passes. My impatience, 
my love, prevents me from sleeping. 

This is Villenave's last letter. Can we not fancy that 
Sunday evening at Nantes — how Marianne sent her maid 
an hour before the time to meet the coach and conduct 



302 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Villenave to his lodging, how he goes thither to make him- 
self presentable, how Marianne has taken unusual pains with 
her toilette, how she questions the maid as to how he 
looked, and what he said, how she listens impatiently for 
the bell, how it rings at last, and then — There is not a 
line from Villenave to any outsider to give us his impres- 
sions of the interview. We have only Marianne's mention 
of it, and this does not enter into details, but takes every- 
thing for granted. She writes to Melanie on the following 
Saturday : — 

To depict my felicity would be to depict my gratitude, but I 
know of no colours, no pencils, which can express what I feel, no, 
not even yours. A happiness like mine is felt, it is not expressed. 
... I write you this letter just before going to bed, for there is no 
writing when my dear Villenave is here, I can then only look at him, 
listen to him, talk with him, occupy myself with him. 

A week later she writes to Madame de Ginguene at 
Rennes, pressing her to come over to the wedding : — 

Remember that one generally marries but once in a lifetime, and 
that there is only one M. de Villenave in the world. He has tra- 
velled a hundred leagues for me, I feel that I would go a thousand 
for him. . . . One of the few men met with only in romances or in 
women's imaginations. . . . We are having delicious days together. 
No, never was there a mind more amiable, more tender, more sensi- 
tive, more loving, more loved, more worthy of being so. 

On the 7th April she writes to Melanie : — 

Never will be effaced from my recollection the moment when we 
saw and embraced each other for the first time. My heart could 
scarcely contain its feelings. I was no longer on earth, I was in 
heaven. I am still there, and can say that I know and taste happi- 
ness in all its purity. 

Villenave is seemingly capable of jealousy, for she now 
writes to Blancard asking him to drop the correspondence, 
and he, with renewed good wishes, regretfully consents. 
On the 22nd April she tells Melanie that her father and her 
lover had had a few quarrels. The father evidently did not 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 303 

think a precarious tutorship a satisfactory position, and he 
wished Villenave to become a barrister at Nantes, but Ville- 
nave feels that it would be ungrateful to the Courteilles 
ladies abruptly to throw up his post. He is therefore to 
return to it, and Marianne is to join him in two months. 
The wedding has been delayed by Villenave having to send 
for documents. 

We marry, then, on Thursday or Saturday, at 8 p.m. I need not 
beg you to address supplications to heaven for your friend's happi- 
ness. ... I have but one thing to ask of heaven, the continuance 
of the love of him whom I shall not cease to adore except on 
ceasing to live, but who would soon make me cease to live by 
ceasing to love me. ... I send you a million kisses, as much for 
my dear Navau (a pet name she had given Villenave) as for myself. 

On May eve, 1792, heedless or unconscious of gathering 
political troubles, Miss Tasset became Madame de Ville- 
nave, and the bridegroom, who, as we have seen, dabbled 
in rhyme, wrote sixteen verses, which were appended to the 
letters. Whether, after all, he returned to Courteilles is 
uncertain, but if so, he soon left and settled at Nantes, 
where an illustrious refugee became his friend, and perhaps 
his lodger. Bailly, the astronomer and ex-mayor of Paris, 
so suddenly raised to eminence, so suddenly fallen from it, 
went thither about July 1792, in the hope that the influence 
of a friend, Gelee de Premon, would ensure him protection, 
but the poor old man's troubles were soon renewed. 6000 
francs were claimed from him as arrears of taxes for the 
house he had occupied as mayor, and to meet this claim he 
had to part with his library. His house at Chaillot, just 
outside Paris, had also to be sold. Moreover, the Giron- 
dins, then in power, sent orders to the Nantes authorities 
to place him under surveillance, and once a week Bailly 
had to go and report himself to the public prosecutor, 
Garreau (a friend of Marianne's), who, however, we may 
be sure, made the ceremony as little irksome as possible. 
Roland, best described as Madame Roland's husband, next 
wrote a curt letter to tell him that the apartments at the 



304 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Louvre, occupied for more than a century by his family, as 
curators jof the picture galleries, must be vacated, and a 
bailiff was even sent to clear out the furniture. No wonder 
if with all these worries Bailly could not collect his thoughts 
for serious studies. He spent most of his time in novel- 
reading, and would pleasantly say, " My day has been well 
employed, for since getting up this morning I have read two 
or three volumes of the latest novel from the circulating 
library, and I can give a summary of it to anybody who 
likes to hear it." 1 This pastime, however, was varied by 
conversations with Villenave and his friend Pariset, then 
twenty-two years of age, afterwards a distinguished surgeon, 
on Homer, Aristotle, Plato, French classics, astronomy, 
and scientific progress. Bailly was pressed by Casans, 
who, by the capture of the island of Grenada, had become 
a British subject, to accompany him to England or America, 
and Madame Bailly, who was with him, was anxious that 
he should do so, but Bailly thought it cowardly, after the 
part he had played, to flee the country. After the siege of 
Nantes, however, by the Vendeans, the revolutionary tem- 
per became too heated to allow of his remaining there, and 
he accepted an invitation (unhappily countermanded too 
late) to go and live with Laplace, his fellow astronomer, at 
Melun. Villenave, whom ^Bailly had got to style " my son," 
was going with his wife to Rennes, on a visit doubtless to 
Madame de Ginguene, and on the 6th of July 1793 Bailly 
started with them. Of his rough reception by the Melun 
mob, his despatch as a prisoner to Paris, his manly evi- 
dence at Marie Antoinette's trial, his own condemnation, 
the hours of waiting in the rain and cold because the mob 
insisted on the guillotine being removed from the Champ 
de Mars to a neighbouring ditch — of this I need not speak. 
It is pleasing to think that Bailly passed a year of compara- 
tive tranquillity in the society, perhaps under the roof of the 
Villenaves, so that when on the 26th February 1844 Arago 
at the Paris Academy of Sciences delivered a eulogium 
on Bailly, he could point to Villenave and Pariset, there 

11 Condorcet while in concealment in Paris also read novels to kill time. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 305 

present, and thank them in the name of science and 
humanity for ensuring some moments of peaceful happi- 
ness to an old man, heart-broken at public ingratitude. 

Oh that Villenave's entire conduct during the Revolu- 
tion had been on the same plane ! But he became presi- 
dent of the revolutionary clubs, and drew up an address 
complimenting the Convention on the execution of Louis 
XVI. On Nantes being besieged by the Vendeans, he 
argued that " law should slumber in such critical circum- 
stances," and that though prisoners should have a fair trial 
the penalty should be promptly enforced. He was shortly 
afterwards appointed assistant public prosecutor. Accord- 
ing to his own statement he brought to the block the first 
noble, the first priest, and the first bourgeois in Nantes, and 
in three months conducted a hundred prosecutions. It is 
true that he afterwards retracted this assertion as having 
been made to save his life, and maintained that during his 
fifty-five official sittings there were but twenty-two condem- 
nations, with 109 acquittals. Whichever version is true, 1 
he was not " thorough " enough for the infamous Carrier, 
whose abominations at Nantes eclipsed even the atrocities 
of Paris. With revolutionary inconsistency Marianne was 
arrested as a foreigner, though her father was left unmo- 
lested, but she was soon released. Not so Villenave, who 
was apprehended on the 10th September 1793, and with 
130 other inhabitants was sent by Carrier, on the 9th of 
November 1793, to Paris, as Girondin conspirators. They 
were driven thither like a flock of sheep, sometimes tied 
together with a rope to prevent escape, frequently crowded 
at night into small bare chapels, and exposed to all sorts of 
privations. Indeed it seems to have been intended that 
they should be massacred on the way. Some succumbed 
on the journey, and illness obliged Villenave to halt for 
some time at Blois. The survivors, on reaching Paris, were 
treated with comparative humanity, but for six weeks 
Marianne's letters were withheld from Villenave, as the 

1 He pleaded in excuse that few men had passed through the Revolution 
blameless. 

U 



306 PARIS IN 1789-94 

chief conspirator, though the other prisoners received 
theirs. 1 Tasset went up to Paris to plead for his son-in- 
law, and he published Villenave's account of the prisoners' 
journey, which speedily ran through several editions. 
Happily the trial was postponed till after Robespierre's 
fall, and the prisoners, after a seven days' trial, were ac- 
quitted, in September 1794, by the strange verdict of 
"Guilty of conspiring against the unity of the Republic, 
but not guilty of counter-revolutionary intentions." Ville- 
nave stayed in Paris to defend several of Carrier's accom- 
plices, who with two exceptions were acquitted, Carrier, 
however, paying the full penalty of his crimes. 

Returning to Nantes, Villenave practised as a barrister. 
He had aristocratic clients, but as he left it to them to pay 
what they chose, his receipts were scarcely a thousand 
crowns (.£200) a year. When therefore the bar was re- 
organised he did not care to qualify, but contented himself 
with a professorship. From 1797 to 1800 he also edited a 
newspaper. Tasset, impoverished by the Revolution, died 
in 1801, and two years later Villenave, selling his library, 
removed to Paris, to a fifth floor in the house of the poe- 
taster Delille. He supported himself by newspaper articles, 
compilations, and numerous contributions to the Biographie 
Universelle. He formed a fresh library of 25,000 volumes, 
and his house was the resort of literary, political, and even 
ecclesiastical celebrities, for the Revolution had made him, 
like many other free-thinkers, a good Catholic. A political 
Vicar of Bray, he was by turns royalist, Girondin, im- 
perialist, legitimist, and Orleanist, but this was from tem- 
perament rather than interest, for we hear of no patronage 
from these successive governments. Let us hope he was 
more constant to his wife, who, as I find by her tombstone 
at Montparnasse, died in 1832. Villenave, who published 
verses as late as 1844, lived till 1846. He left two 
children, Melanie, named after Mdlle. Muller, who was 

1 His old patronesses, Madame de Rochechouart and Madame de Richelieu, 
were also prisoners in Paris in the spring of 1794, and Courteilles passed into 
other hands. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 307 

born in 1796, and died in 1871, and Theodore, who was 
born in 1798, and died in 1867. Both were authors, and in 
one of her books, Mdlanie, 1 Madame Valdor, pays a warm 
tribute to her mother. Two other children had died in 
infancy. Marianne, one is inclined to think, was more 
than equal to her husband, who in his prison notes de- 
scribes her as "alike superior in mind and in heart." 
Her life, beginning in London and ending in Paris, was a 
singularly chequered one. Had she written a complete 
autobiography, though it might not have equalled in interest 
the four months' glimpse given by her letters, it would not 
have fallen into such speedy oblivion as the multifarious 
productions of her husband and her children. 

Let us now turn to the letters of a woman likewise 
steeped in Rousseau, but also in Plutarch, a woman there- 
fore of very different mould, a mixture of the Roman 
matron and the modern sentimentalist, of Portia and Julia, 
yet who but for the Revolution would have been unknown 
save to a small circle. These letters were addressed to a 
man likewise steeped in Plutarch and Rousseau, drawn in 
his turn into the revolutionary vortex, and destined like 
her to be a victim of his virtues and illusions. I speak of 
Madame Roland and Francois Nicolas Leonard Buzot. 
That a platonic affection existed between them had long 
been suspected, but no tangible traces of it were supposed 
to be in existence till 1863, when a young man offered a 
Paris bookseller some manuscripts bequeathed him by his 
father, and of the source of which he was ignorant. These 
papers, purchased for a nominal sum, included five letters 
written from prison in 1793 by Madame Roland to 
Buzot. 

1 Separated from her husband, Melanie in 1832 was the mistress of the elder 
Dumas, but she ultimately became a devout Catholic. Napoleon III. pensioned 
her for some service rendered to him during his Presidency of the Republic, and 
her salon at Paris was frequented by struggling artists and adventurers, her kindly 
interest in whom sometimes exceeded the bounds of discretion. Thus she once 
took to Fontainebleau Lazerges, a painter who had fruitlessly solicited Court 
patronage, and threw herself down with him at the feet of the Empress Eugenie as 
she was mounting a horse. The Empress, at first angry, then amused, commis- 
sioned him to do some decorations. 



308 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Marie Phlipon, then 39 years of age, had been since 
1780 the wife of Roland, an inspector of manufactures, 
who after three years of vacillation had offered her his 
hand. She was introduced to him by her old school- 
mates, the two sisters Cannet, of Amiens. One of them, 
Henriette, had received attentions from Roland, and had 
probably counted on marrying him, so that his choice of 
Marie Phlipon caused a long estrangement. The estrange- 
ment, indeed, continued till this very year 1793, when 
Henriette visited Madame Roland in prison, and offered, 
as we have seen, to change clothes with her, that she 
might escape and live for her husband and daughter. The 
generous proposal was of course declined. The prisoner 
must have felt that she had been the cause, involuntarily or 
otherwise, of one sacrifice, and that she could not accept 
a second, that of life itself. In 1780 she had had several 
suitors, and at least one semi-engagement. We cannot help 
speculating on what would have happened had Henriette 
Cannet become Madame Roland, and had Marie Phlipon 
found another husband or found none. Roland would 
never probably have become a minister, and both he and 
Marie Phlipon might have lived in seclusion and security. 
As it was, she only brought him to the point of marrying 
her by taking refuge for two months as boarder in a Paris 
convent. 1 That she ever really loved him may be doubted. 2 
He was exactly twenty years her senior, and apparently old 
for his years, so that in 1793, though he was only 59, she 
could style him " my venerable husband," and his interests 
were in technical subjects. An inventory of his papers in the 
National Archives — the papers were restored to Bosc, his 
daughter's guardian, in May 1795, but the inventory re- 
mains — shows that he studied dyeing, soap-boiling, oils, 
fisheries, cattle-breeding, and a great variety of industrial 
questions, apparently with a view to the publication of an 

1 See Join-Lambert, Mariage de Madame Roland; 1896. 

3 The pre-nuptial correspondence was bequeathed by the grand-daughter, 
Madame Chaley, to the Paris National Library, and has been published. Its tone 
contrasts strikingly with that of the letters to Buzot. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 309 

encyclopaedia. He was stiff and dogmatic, and was intel- 
lectually his wife's inferior. When he was in office Danton 
sarcastically spoke of her as the real minister. She was, 
however, a virtuous wife and mother, and he certainly became 
strongly attached to her. But in 1789 Buzot, who was six years 
her junior, entered on the scene as deputy for Evreux. 
Madame Roland found in him a kindred spirit. Bosc, another 
member of the Convention, had long previously made her 
acquaintance, 1 and in 1790-91 she had to repress the threat- 
ening ardour of his friendship. Bancal des Issarts, a third 
deputy, was likewise an admirer of this fascinating woman, 
and she would fain have married him to Helen Maria 
Williams. Buzot alone found his passion reciprocated. 
He, too, had been married, indeed, since 1784, but to a 
woman thirteen years his senior, 2 and as incapable of 
sympathy with his classical ideals as Roland' was incapable 
of sympathy with his wife's. Elective affinities thus 
brought them together, and Madame Roland, with the 
candour which she had imbibed from Rousseau, felt it her 
duty to reveal to Roland that had she been still free her 
choice would have settled on Buzot. This assuredly well- 
meant but cruel confession was probably one of the 
reasons why Roland, on quitting office, was anxious to 
return to the south ; but he was detained in Paris by 
the audit of his accounts, and presently the blow fell. 
Both Roland and Buzot were prosecuted as Girondins, 
and had to conceal themselves in the country. Madame 
Roland, too, was thrown into prison, a sham release 
one day at the Abbaye being followed by immediate 
re-arrest. 

While thus in prison she addressed these letters to 
Buzot, and possibly others also which did not reach him 
or have not been preserved. His replies she was obliged 
from constant fear of search to destroy. But her letters 

1 In 1784, on learning that the Rolands had consulted a doctor regarded by 
him as an enemy, he fled in tears from their house, and the coolness lasted for 
some time. " Love me, hate my enemies." 

2 F. ia, 570. Her claim for compensation for the pillage and demolition of 
Buzot's house at Evreux shows indifferent spelling. 



310 PARIS IN 1789-94 

suffice to show that he must have answered in a similar 
strain. They demonstrate the purity of the relations 
between them, but it is painful to find Madame Roland 
welcoming imprisonment as relieving her from irksome 
conjugal duties. It is equally painful to think of Madame 
Buzot, still respected and in a fashion loved, but thrown 
far into the background in her husband's affections. It is 
painful, too, to think of Roland, hiding like an outlaw in 
Normandy, and eventually, on hearing that his wife was to 
be tried, stabbing himself by the roadside. It is sad to 
think of Buzot, a fugitive in Gascony, wandering about with 
Petion and Barbaroux, and all three at the beginning of 
July 1794 shooting themselves because they mistook for 
pursuers some peasants going to a fair. 

The letters are closely written on sheets of note-paper, 
in all thirty-two pages, and with only a single trifling erasure. 
Dauban, in publishing them in 1864, in his &tude sur 
Madame Roland, gave facsimiles, and their authenticity is 
beyond question. The handwriting 1 is very firm and 
regular, the same firm hand in which the day before her 
death she signed her interrogatory by the judges. I quote 
only the passages relating to her attachment for Buzot. 
Of the remainder it is enough to say that she refused to 
escape from prison, though pressed to do so both by 
Roland and Buzot, lest she should compromise jailors who 
were kind to her, and that she also deprecated a premature 
rising against the Jacobins. She was willing to wait, and 
even to forfeit her life, so that adequate preparations might 
be made for delivering France from the Jacobin yoke. At 
the time of writing these letters, however, she had no 
serious apprehension of being brought to trial. She must 
have been rudely undeceived before the 8th November 
1793, when she was placed at the bar. 

Dauban also published the portrait of Buzot, from 
a small engraving at the back of which were eight 
small pages of Madame Roland's writing, giving a short 

1 Which can be compared with and verified by that of her Memoirs in the 
National Library at Paris. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 311 

biography of him, and speaking of him in the past tense as 
though already dead. Here is one passage : — 

Private sorrows {chagrins de cceur) increased the melancholy to 
which he was naturally inclined. . . . People will one day seek for 
his portrait, and place it among those of the generous friends of 
liberty who believed in virtue, ventured to preach it as the sole 
basis of a republic, and had the strength to practise it. 

Dauban suggests that this portrait was the one clasped 
to her heart by Madame Roland, that it was found on 
her when guillotined, and that her letters were in like 
manner found on Buzot's remains, half devoured by dogs. 
It is more probable that the portrait was a duplicate in 
Buzot's possession, and that both it and the letters were 
entrusted by him to Jerome Letellier, with instructions in 
case of his death to burn the letters. 

Let us now read what they said of themselves. 
Madame Roland, in her " Appeal to Posterity," writes : — 

Rousseau showed me the domestic happiness at which I might 
aim, and the ineffable delights which I might enjoy. Ah ! if 
entirely guaranteeing me from what are called weaknesses, could he 
guarantee me from what is called a passion ? In the corrupted age 
in which I was to live, and in the Revolution which I was far from 
foreseeing, I brought with me all that was to render me capable of 
great sacrifices and expose me to great misfortunes. Death alone 
will be for me the termination of both. 

And Buzot, in a fragment of autobiography written a few 
months before his end, says : — 

If some passions are intermixed [in his character] they are those 
which may honour mankind, great and simple like nature, which 
often uses them to develop and perfect her finest works. Happy 
the sage who never experienced them ; still happier he who renders 
himself better by them. 

This is an evident allusion to his attachment to Madame 
Roland, and in a letter to Letellier he says : — 

She no longer lives, she no longer lives, my friend. The 
wretches have murdered her. Judge whether nything remains for 



312 PARIS IN 1789-94 

me to regret. When you learn my death you will burn her letters. 
I do not know why I desire you to keep for yourself alone the 
portrait. You were equally dear to both of us. But what embitters 
my last moments is the fearful picture of my wife in poverty. I do 
not know whither this poor woman has retired. I have been unable 
to inform her of my fate, or learn anything of hers. I beg you in 
the name of friendship to care for her and help her with your 
counsels. When it shall be possible to claim the rights of justice 
and humanity, I hope some resources of my landed property which 
cannot have been destroyed will remain for her. 

In his last letter to his wife Buzot says : " I await thee 
in the home of the just," and in his autobiography he 
writes : — 

And thou, poor unfortunate, my wife, where art thou ? What is 
to become of thee ? How lonely thou wilt be on earth, for I feel 
that I shall not see thee again. It must end ; we must part. Ah ! 
when the news, the fearful news, of my death reaches thee, do not 
be disheartened. Thou must not give way to useless tears. I 
thank the good people who have succoured thee. May Heaven 
reward their affectionate friendship ! I conjure them to continue 
their attentions, to assist thee by their exertions until the time when 
thou shalt be allowed to establish thy right to my confiscated 
property. 1 

Here are now Madame Roland's letters to Buzot : — 

Abbaye, 2.2nd June [1793]. 
I read them [Buzot's letters] over and over again. I press them 
to my heart. I cover them with my kisses. I had no longer hoped 
to receive them. ....... I was in the most cruel anguish until I was 

assured of thy escape. It was renewed by the decree of accusation 
against thee. They owed, indeed, this atrocity to thy courage. . . . 

As for me, I shall know how peaceably to await the return of the 
reign of justice, or to undergo the extremest excesses of tyranny in 
such a way that my example also may not be quite useless. If I 
have had any fear it was of thy making imprudent attempts for me. 
Mon ami, it is by saving thy country that thou canst rescue me, and 
I would not be delivered at its expense, but should expire satisfied 
with knowing thee to be effectively serving thy country. . . . 

1 In April 1796 she obtained, in common with the widows of other Girondin 
martyrs, a pension of 2000 francs. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 313 

Behind the bars and locks I enjoy independence of thought, and 
I am more at peace with my conscience than my oppressors with 
their domination. . . . The unfortunate R[oland] has been twenty 
days in asylums with timorous friends, concealed from all eyes, 
more a captive than I am myself. I have been afraid for his head 
and his health. He is now in thy neighbourhood. 1 Is this also 
the case morally ? I do not venture to tell thee, and thou art the 
only being in the world that can appreciate it, that I was not very 
sorry to be arrested. They will be less furious, less ardent, against 
R[oland], I said to myself. If they bring him to trial I shall be 
able to back him in a way which will be conducive to his reputation. 
It seemed to me that I was thus discharging a debt due to his 
chagrins ; but dost thou not see also that by being alone it is with 
thee that I dwell? Thus by captivity I sacrifice myself to my 
husband and preserve myself for mon ami, and I owe to my 
executioners the reconciliation of duty and love. Do not pity me. 
Others admire my courage, but they do not know my enjoyments. 
Thou, who shouldst feel them, preserve all their charm by the 
constancy of thy courage. That amiable Madame Goussard, how 
surprised I was to see her sweet face, to feel myself clasped in her 
arms, bedewed with her tears, to see her draw from her bosom two 
of thy letters. But I was unable to read them in her presence, and 
I. was ungrateful enough to find her visit long. She wished to take 
back a word from my hand. I found it no easier to write to thee in 
her presence, and I was almost annoyed at her officious eagerness. 
. . . Well, we cannot cease to be mutually worthy of the sentiments 
which have animated us. One is not unfortunate with them. 
Adieu, mon ami, mon bien-aime, adieu ! 

yd July [St. Pelagie\. 
What pleasure unknown to the tyrants whom the vulgar fancy 
happy in the exercise of their power ! And if it is true that a 
Supreme Intelligence apportions blessings and evils among men 
according to the laws of strict compensation, can I complain of my 
misfortune when such delights are reserved to me ? I receive your 
letter of the 27th. I still hear thy courageous voice. I am witness 
of thy resolutions. I experience the sentiments which animate thee. 
I pride myself on loving thee and being loved by thee. Mon ami, 
let us not go astray to the length of striking the bosom of our Mother 
by speaking ill of that virtue which is purchased, it is true, by cruel 
sacrifices, but who pays them in her turn by compensations of such 

1 Roland was at Rouen, Buzot at Caen. 



314 PARIS IN 1789-94 

great price. Tell me, knowest thou a sweeter moment than those 
passed in the innocence and charm of an affection which Nature 
avows and which delicacy regulates, which renders homage to the 
duty of the privations which it imposes, and is nourished by the 
very strength of supporting them ? Knowest thou a greater advan- 
tage than that of being superior to adversity and death, and of 
finding in the heart something to flavour and embellish life to its 
latest breath ? Hast thou ever better experienced it than from the 
attachment which binds us together in spite of the contradictions of 
society and the horrors of oppression ? As I have told thee, I owe 
to the latter the enjoyment of my captivity. Proud of being perse- 
cuted at a time when character and probity are proscribed, I should 
even without thee have borne it with dignity ; but thou renderest 
it sweet and dear to me. The wicked think to crush me by putting 
me in fetters. Fools ! what matters it to me whether I reside here 
or there ? Do I not go everywhere with my heart, and to confine 
me in a prison, is it not to give myself undividedly up to thee? 
My company is what I love; my study is to think of it. My 
duties, as soon as I am alone, are limited to good wishes for all that 
is just and honest, and what I love ever holds the first place in that 
category. Ah, I feel too well what is imposed on me in the natural 
course of things to complain of the violence which has diverted it. 
If I am to die, well, I know what life has of the best, and its dura- 
tion would only oblige me perhaps to fresh sacrifices. . . . The 
moment when I was proudest of existing, when I felt most strongly 
that exultation of mind which braves all dangers and applauds itself 
for incurring them, was that when I entered the Bastille which the 
executioners had chosen for me. I will not say that I hastened to 
meet them, but it is quite true that I did not shun them. I had 
refrained from considering whether their fury would extend to me. 
I believed that if it went that length it would give me an opportunity 
of serving X. 1 by my testimony, my conscience, and my firmness. I 
thought it delightful to combine the means of being useful to him 
with a mode of life which left me more to thee. I should like to 
sacrifice my life for him in order to acquire the right of giving thee 
alone my latest breath. . . . Poor X. is in a melancholy condition. 
My second arrest filled him with terror. He sent me from sixty 
miles off a person whom he commissioned to attempt everything. I 
urged the imprudence and danger of such attempts. Moreover I will 
not lend myself to them. . . . May this letter reach thee soon, carry 
thee a fresh testimony of my unalterable sentiments, communicate 

1 Roland. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 315 

to thee the tranquillity which I .enjoy, and add to all that is 
generous and useful which thou mayest feel and carry out the inex- 
pressible charm of affections which the tyrants never know, affections 
which serve at once as an ordeal and a recompense of virtue, affec- 
tions which give value to life and render one superior to all ills. 

6th July. 
I saw yesterday for the second time that excellent V[allee], who 
handed me thine of the 30th and 1st. I did not open them in his 
presence. One does not read before a third person, whoever he be, 
even if he knew what he was bearer of, but his attachment for thee, 
his devotion to the good cause, his mildness and honesty, made me 
converse with him a pretty long time with pleasure, although I had 
thy packet in my pocket, and this is assuredly saying much. My 
deliverance is infallible through the amelioration of affairs. It is 
only a question of waiting. This waiting is painful for me, and in 
truth, with the exception of a few cherished moments, the sweetest 
time for me for the last six months is that of this retreat. I will not 
repeat to thee the difficulties and dangers of an attempt [at escape] 
in the present building, considering its construction and the number 
of warders. Nothing would deter me if I had to brave them alone 
to join thee, but to expose our friends and emerge from the chains 
with which the persecution of the wicked honours me in order to 
resume others which nobody sees and which cannot fail me, this is 
in no way urgent. I feel all the generosity of thy care, the purity of 
thy wishes, but the more I appreciate them the more I love my pre- 
sent captivity. He [Roland] is at R[ouen], quite near thee, as thou 
seest, with old friends and quite unknown, well cared for, as it is 
quite necessary he should be in order that I may not be uneasy, but 
in a moral condition so melancholy, so crushing, that I cannot leave 
this place except to go to his side. I have rejected the proposals of 
the same kind as thine which he had formed respecting me, and for 
which there is still in Paris a person whom he sent me. . . . 
Would they drag me before the revolutionary tribunal? I have 
calculated even that, and I do not fear it. It would be a fresh 
school [scandal ?] on their part. I should make it turn to the profit 
of the commonwealth, and it would be very difficult for them to 
make it result in my ruin. ... I sent four days ago for this dear 
picture} which from a kind of superstition I did not bring with me 
to prison ; but why then refuse oneself this sweet picture, a slight 
but precious compensation for the absence of the original ? It is 

1 These words are written in English. 



3*6 PARIS IN 1789-94 

on my heart, concealed from all eyes, felt at all moments, often 
bathed with my tears. Ah ! I am imbued with thy courage, 
honoured by thy attachment, and proud of all that both can inspire 
in thy proud and feeling heart. I cannot believe that Heaven 
reserves trials alone for sentiments so pure and so worthy of its 
favour. This kind of confidence makes one bear life and contem- 
plate death with calmness. Let us enjoy with gratitude the blessings 
which are given us. Whoever knows how to love like us bears with 
him the principle of the greatest and best actions, the price of the 
most painful sacrifice, the compensation for all ills. Adieu, mon 
bien-aime, adieu ! 

"jth July. 
Thou canst not conceive, mon ami, the charm of a prison where 
you are accountable only to your own heart for the employment of 
every moment. No annoying distraction, no painful sacrifice, no 
fastidious cares, none of those duties all the more stringent as they 
are worthy of respect by an upright heart, none of those contradic- 
tions of laws or prejudices of society with the sweetest inspirations of 
nature. No jealous look spies the expression of what you feel, or 
the occupation which you choose. Nobody suffers from your melan- 
choly or your listlessness, nobody expects from you efforts or 
requires sentiments which are beyond your power. Given up to 
yourself, to truth, without having obstacles to vanquish or combats 
to sustain, you may, without wounding the rights or affections of 
anybody, abandon your mind to its own rectitude, recover your 
moral independence amidst an apparent captivity, and exercise it 
with a plenitude which social relations nearly always disturb. I had 
not allowed myself even to seek this independence, or thus to extri- 
cate myself from the happiness of another which it was so difficult 
for me to effect. Events have procured me what I should not 
have obtained without a kind of crime. How I cherish the fetters 
in which it is free for me to love thee undividedly and to think con- 
stantly of thee ! Here every other occupation is suspended. I have 
no longer any obligation but to him who loves me and so well 
deserves being loved. Pursue thy generous career, serve thy 
country, save liberty ; thy every act is an enjoyment for me, and 
thy conduct is my triumph. I will not scrutinise the designs of 
Heaven. I will not allow myself to form culpable wishes, but I 
thank it for having substituted my present fetters for those which I 
formerly wore, and this change seems to me a beginning of favour. 
If it should not accord me more, let it preserve this situation for me 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 317 

until my complete deliverance from a world given up to injustice 
and misfortune. I am just interrupted. My faithful maid-servant 
brings me thy letter of the 3rd. ... I hasten to despatch this letter. 
There is always so much delay in reaching its destination. Adieu, 
mon ami, mon bien-aime. No, this is not an eternal adieu. We are 
not parted for ever, or destiny would greatly shorten the thread of 
my days. Ah ! take care not to ruin everything by inconsiderate 
ardour. 1 

'jth [July], Evening. 
Sweet occupation, touching communication of heart and thought, 
charming abandonment, free expression of unalterable sentiment 
and of the fugitive idea, fill my solitary hours. You embellish the 
most melancholy spot, you diffuse in the depth of dungeons the 
happiness to which the occupant of palaces sometimes vainly 
aspires. The usual abode of crime has become the refuge of 
innocence and love. Purified by their presence, it offers, in the 
narrow limits which hem thee in, only the image of peace, the 
instruments of study, the affectionate recollections of a loving soul, 
a pure conscience, the resignation of courage, and the hope of 
virtue. Oh thou so beloved and so deserving of it, moderate 
the impatience which makes thee tremble. In thinking of the 
fetters with which they have loaded me, dost thou not see the bless- 
ings which I owe them ? . . . Judge with the same impartiality the 
advantages of a situation which leaves me entirely to myself over 
that in which sacred and terrible obligations would constrain my 
faculties and tear my feeble heart. I know what destiny has willed. 
One would almost say that compassionating my ills, touched by the 
combats which itself had imposed on me, it prepared the events 
which were to procure me some respite and make me enjoy repose. 
It has used the hands of the wicked to bring me into port. It has 
employed them in doing good against their will, and by unveiling 
all their perfidy, so as to inspire hatred, the forerunner of their fall, 
it gives my courage an opportunity of being conducive to the 
renown of him with whom it had bound me ; it yields to my affec- 
tion the liberty of expanding in silence and unbosoming itself to 
thee. Oh, mon ami, let us bless Providence. It has not rejected 
us. It will do more perhaps some day. Let us ever, by deserving 
its blessings, avenge the tardiness which it seems to show in accord- 
ing them. . . . I habitually remain in my cell. It is just big enough 
to allow of a chair beside the bed. There, at a small table, I read, 

1 This is a warning against a premature and therefore fruitless rising. 



318 PARIS IN 1789-94 

draw, and write. It is there that, thy portrait on my breast, or under 
my eyes, I thank Heaven for having known thee, for having allowed 
me to enjoy the inexpressible blessing of loving and being loved with 
that generosity, that delicacy, which vulgar minds will never know, 
and which are superior to all their pleasures. . . . But dost thou 
know, thou speakest to me very heedlessly of the sacrifice of thy 
life, and seemest to have solved it quite independently of me ? In 
what way dost thou wish me to contemplate it ? Is it decreed that 
we cannot deserve each other except by ruining ourselves ? And if 
fate do not allow us soon to meet, must we then renounce all hope 
of ever being brought together, and see only the tomb, where 
our elements may mix? Metaphysicians and vulgar lovers talk 
much of perseverance, but the perseverance of conduct is rarer and 
more difficult than that of the affections. Assuredly thou art not 
one to lack anything appertaining to a strong and superior mind. 
Do not, then, allow thyself to be led by the very excess of courage 
towards the goal whither despair would also lead thee. . . . Adieu, 
mon bien-ai?ne. 

It would be unfair not to quote Madame Roland's fare- 
well letter to her only child, 1 for it shows that if not an 
altogether satisfactory wife she was an affectionate mother. 
On the 10th October 1793, a month before her end, she 
wrote from St. Pelagie prison : — 

I do not know, darling, whether I shall be allowed to see or 
write to thee again. Remember thy mother. These few words con- 
tain all the best that I can say to thee. Thou hast seen me happy in 
the discharge of my duties, and in being useful to those who suffer. 
This is the only way of being so. Thou hast seen me placid in 
misfortune and captivity, because I had no remorse, but had the 
recollection and joy left by good actions. These are the only 
means of bearing the ills of life and the vicissitudes of fate. Per- 
haps, and I hope so, thou art not reserved for ordeals like mine, but 
there are others from which thou wilt nevertheless have to defend 
thyself. A serious and busy life is the first safeguard from all perils, 
and necessity as well as wisdom enforces thee to steady work. Be 
worthy of thy parents. They leave thee great examples, and if thou 
knowest how to profit by them thou wilt not lead a useless existence. 
Farewell, dear child, thou whom I suckled, and whom I would fain 

1 Whom the faithful Bosc had, on the day of the mother's arrest, placed under 
the care of Madame Creuze La Touche. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 319 

imbue with all my sentiments. A time will come when thou wilt be 
able to appreciate all the effort that I am making at this moment 
not to be overcome by thy sweet image. I clasp thee to my bosom. 
Farewell, my Eudora. 

Let us now give some specimens of the love or family 
letters of the aristocracy. On the recapture of Verdun and 
Longwy in the autumn of 1792, a considerable number of 
letters addressed from Treves, Luxembourg, Brussels, and 
other places to husbands or lovers in the invading army 
fell into the hands of General Kellerman's vanguard. They 
were published at Paris in December 1792 by the General 
Security Committee, 1 and their authenticity was beyond 
dispute. Those letters which give political or military 
information, or which speak of pecuniary embarrassments 
and projects of vengeance on the expected capture of 
Paris, do not concern us ; but there are some classified 
under the head of "Amour," from which I shall quote 
some passages. They show, equally with the Villenave 
and Roland correspondence, the powerful influence of 
Rousseau. The Convention, with a touch of gallantry 
which would hardly have been expected, suppressed the 
names of most of the writers, giving merely those of the 
intended recipients. 

To COMTE DE JARNAC. 

Aix, $tk October 1792. 
Return promptly, my soul, my life, my happiness. With what 
pleasure I shall wait on thee ! I mean to spoil thee at least an 
entire month, and make thee forget in my arms all thy sufferings. 
Take care of thy health. . . . Well, meanwhile let us be content 
with the illusion. A thousand and thousand of kisses, most beloved 
of chickens (poulets). 

This was evidently not written by his wife. 
To Louis de Lescale. 

Zth October 1792. 
Ah, my dearest, what a misfortune to be distant from all that 
one loves. It would be a great consolation for me to know that 
thou at least hearest news of me. It is true that this does not 

1 Correspondance Generate des Emigres. 



320 PARIS IN 1789-94 

ensure me thy letters, but at least I shall be alone in disquietude, 
and thou, my beloved, thou wouldst know that we are well. I 
would give even my last chemise to know as much of thee. It 
seems to me that we are more unfortunate than ever, but let me see 
thee again, let us be together, and I shall know how to bear every- 
thing. Reassure me, beloved and affectionate ami. Live for thy- 
self, live for me, live for our dear children. I adore thee beyond all 
expression, and deposit here for thee a thousand kisses. 

To Baron Flachslanden. 

oJoth September. 
If I saw thy handwriting it would console me, my dearest. 
What an absence, dearest ! How can I bear it ? When I see thy 
letters my blood is revivified. What will it be when I clasp thee to 
my heart? I shall expire in thy arms, my dearest. Hasten to 
summon me thither. Alas, meanwhile I pass cruel days and still 
more cruel nights. 

To Comte d' Avar ay. 1 

i%th September. 
I am grieved, my dearest, to know that you are exposed to so 
many fatigues. That night which you spent in the open air, that 
wound which you received, has given me as much pain as if I had 
myself undergone it. 

To M. Fitzjames. 2 

Spa, 2%th September. 
I live on news from you. I saw yesterday writing which resem- 
bled yours. My heart beat, and I experienced a delightful sensa- 
tion. ... I used to think that love was the poison of life, that 
men had not so much feeling as we [women], and were incapable of 
a real attachment. Ah ! how mistaken I was. There is not a 
second like thee. . . . How happy am I to be attached to you by 
the tenderest, the most profound sentiment ! Master of my destiny, 
of my life. 

To the Marquis d'Autichamp. 3 

Spa. 
Can you maintain this everlasting silence ? Have you then no 
way of mitigating the mischief which you have done to my heart ? 
When men are of this disposition people should be forewarned 
before getting loved by them. 

1 Head of the military household of " Monsieur" (afterwards Louis XVIII.). 

2 Afterwards due de Fitzjames, great-grandson of the duke of Berwick, 
James II. 's natural son. Apparently written by Mademoiselle de la Touche, 
whom he afterwards married. 3 Born 1738, died 1831. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 321 

To MlGRET. 

Luxembourg. 
Return, dearest, I beg thee. I await thee. Take a horse. 
That is better than killing thyself [with fatigue]. I await thee. 
Adieu, my dearest, do not forsake me. I embrace thee with all my 
heart. 

Mademoiselle Rose to M. de Sance. 

Liege, 17th Sefite?nbe?: 
Every fresh day, my dearest friend, is a day of gloom. Where 
art thou, beloved ? For a fortnight I have had no rest. If I fall 
asleep my sleep is a hundred times more cruel than being awake, 
and yet I use every means of warding off this restlessness in sleep. 
. . . Adieu, most adored of lovers. When shall we fly to each 
other, no more to part ? 

To Baron de Viney. 

%th September. 
I count on your heart and your delicacy for hoping that you will 
love me ever, dear Baron. I am in an ecstasy, my heart, when I 
think of you. My husband embraces you and loves you with all 
his heart. 1 Your last letter was for me alone, my dearest. Ah, 
how affectionate it was ! I love you, dearest. I love you. 

To Chevalier de Frelo. 

Maestricht, "jtk October 
I feel more than ever how I love thee. Be careful of thy health, 
dearest ; it will be the happiness of my life. It is impossible for me 
to express all that my heart feels for thee. It is sincere. Believe 
thy Josephine. 

To the Marquis St. Blancard. 

I form plans, and my wishes travel far, I have no power to stop 
them. I adore thee. It is not in my power to love thee less. It 
is for eternity, and it will always be with the same sincerity. Thou 
art all for me, Charles ; thou art my life, my happiness, my misfor- 
tune. All that is not Charles is indifferent for me, and without thee 
I am persuaded I should have no sensation. It is thou who ani- 
matest me; thou alone art my whole existence. Adieu, dearest; 
think of my troubles. Keep well, and judge how I await thee. 

1 This sentence was cruelly italicised by the publisher. 

X 



322 PARIS IN 1789-94 

[No address, but to the care of the Marquis de Vienne.] 

Thou knowest, child, 1 how dear thou art to me. Oh, thou art 
everything for me, mon bon ami, mon tendre ami, I love thee for 
life with all my heart. I cannot express, dearest, the pleasure given 
by the flower which thou hast sent me. I have loaded it with kisses 
with all my heart. When will it be thyself that I shall embrace 
as I love thee ? Adieu, beloved. I embrace thee with all the 
strength of my soul. I am thine for life, my affectionate and 
beloved friend. 

To the Marquis de Digoine. 

2.0th August. 
Adieu, dear. Receive a kiss from thy pussy (minette). 

COMTESSE DE ROCHEGARDE to HER HUSBAND. 

Aix, 20tk September. 
I can help thee by my prayers and ardent wishes. Never have 
I prayed with so much fervour. I often implore the Omnipotent 
Lord and His holy Mother to preserve a life which thou wilt employ 
with me in sanctifying thy life, in bringing up our children as 
Christians and in meriting Heaven. I count also on the prayers of 
those good souls our friends (amies). They commend thee specially 
to the child Jesus, and Mile. Reinglen, that good young lady, 
yesterday offered a communion for thee to the Lord. I admire thy 
confidence in the Mother of Jesus. She will save thee, I am con- 
fident. I, like thee, implore her several times [a day]. 

It is well to close with a letter such as this, which 
leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth. 

Lastly, as a specimen of a paternal letter, let me give 
one of the numerous charming epistles, by turns serious 
and playful, admonitory and effusive, addressed by the 
poet Roucher from St. Pelagie and St. Lazare prisons to 
his daughter Eulalie, whose pet name was Minette or 
Pussy. Writing on the 29th November 1793 he says : — 

So I have had the pleasure of seeing thee this morning, my 
daughter. I was fairly satisfied with thy appearance in health. 
Didst thou feel my kisses, which passed through those ugly bars 
and tried to reach thee? My dear Minette, oh I well felt thine. 

1 Enfant ; this must not be taken literally ; the relation was not parental. 



AMOR OMNIA VINCIT 323 

But how soon thou didst leave ! I would fain see you 1 still and 
tell you what you already know, but what it is a blessing to hear 
and repeat. I thought thy mamma a little worn. Minette, I com- 
mend her to thee. I commit her to thy care. Thou art there to 
replace me, and I am quite sure thou wilt scrupulously fulfil this 
duty. All the letters that I have received have given me so satis- 
factory, so sweet, an account of thee that in thinking of thee I call 
thee always my Antigone. My eyes are bedewed with tears at that 
name, and I would not part at any price with the charm which I 
find connected with it. Sweet child, who makes me love the 
injustice which imprisons me, inasmuch as it has secured me the 
rapid development of virtues and qualities in thee. Strengthen 
thyself day by day in the habit of perfections. Thou wilt be a 
woman whose mind will be loved by intellectual persons ; but what 
is worth a hundred times more, upright, good, and feeling hearts 
will find much communion with thine, for such souls love their like. 
Confess that there are in this mortal life enjoyments which are 
incomparable. Thou feelest to-day the beauty of those fine verses 
of the good man in the fable of Philemon and Baucis : — 

Ni l'or, ni la grandeur ne nous rendent heureux ; 
Ces deux divinites n'accordent a nos voeux, &c. 

In our own selves is the source of the purest delights. It is in 
the testimony of our consciences that we are neither above nor 
below events, and that our mind has not been taken unprepared 
by them. . . . Good night, my dearest and affectionate daughter, 
good night. Thou art doubtless about to go to bed, it is 10 
o'clock. Think of me on going to sleep and on awaking. It will 
only be responding to me. 2 

1 You, not thou, because his wife is included. 

2 Consolations de ma Captiviti. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 

James Watt, jun. — British Club— Jackson — Lord E. Fitzgerald — 
Frost — Madgett — Maxwell — Merry — Oswald — Stephen Sayre — Sir 
R. Smyth — Stone — Yorke 

OF the enthusiasts drawn from all parts of the world to 
Paris by the Revolution, the British visitors, as far as I 
can judge, exceeded those of any other nationality. It 
is true that on Cloots's deputation of the 19th June 1790 
only four British subjects can be positively traced ; but 
seventeen months later, when the monarchy had disap- 
peared and when war between England and France was 
becoming imminent, those whom the excesses of the 
Revolution had not frightened away had a demonstration 
all to themselves. 

I must first speak, however, of an " address of several 
Englishmen to the National Assembly " presented on the 
14th August 1792, which is of interest inasmuch as it was 
drawn up by James Watt, jun., the son of the great Watt. 
It was in these terms : — 

Legislators, — We Englishmen at your bar, friends of the French 
by the ties of brothers and free men, have not seen without the 
liveliest interest the majority of the people in arms to crush the 
vestiges of despotism and throw off the yoke of a perfidious Court. 
Animated by the same sentiments of liberty which arm the hearts 
of French patriots, we admire their courageous conduct on the ever 
memorable day of the 10th August. We congratulate them on 
having crushed all the plots of their internal enemies, and on having 
overthrown the obstacles in the way of the establishment of a perfect 
Constitution founded on the sacred principles of equality. But 
amidst our delight at the triumph of liberty we deplore the pre- 
mature death of those brave citizens who sacrificed their lives, not 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 325 

merely for the liberty of their country, but for the defence of the 
liberties of mankind. Truly touched by the misfortunes of their 
widows and orphans, we are anxious, legislators of the people, to 
place in your hands a sum, modest, it is true, but which may relieve 
their pressing needs. 

Jas. Gamble. James Watt, jun. 

Robert Rayment. W. Arnviside. 1 

A final sentence was erased, which said : — 

May this great and terrible event teach the tyrants of the earth 
to respect the will of the people ; may it teach the nations surround- 
ing you to know and exercise their imprescriptible duties. 

Some of Watt's companions had apparently objected 
to this passage, which obviously advocated a revolution in 
England. The "modest" gift was 1315 francs. The capture 
of the almost undefended Tuileries by the mob looks to 
posterity a much less heroic affair than it seemed at the 
time to these Englishmen. 

Gamble and Rayment will be heard of again presently. 
Of Arnviside, whose very name seems outlandish, I can 
learn nothing. Of young Watt I have elsewhere spoken. 2 

On Sunday, the 18th November 1792, there was a 
British dinner at White's Hotel, or the Hotel d'Angleterre, 
8 Passage des Petits Peres, to celebrate the victories of the 
French arms. Both White's and an adjoining house, the 
Hotel des Etats-Unis, kept by a tailor named Qu^nin, 
were patronised not only by British but by American 
visitors, for in October 1793, H. W. Livingston and J. 
Gregorie dated from White's, then re-named Hotel de 
Philadelphie, a letter to Robespierre offering to supply 
American flour. 3 We shall presently see that the com- 
mittee appointed at this dinner numbered fifty, and possibly 
another fifty were present. French officers and deputies 
had been invited, among them being General Arthur Dillon, 
and two military bands played " Ca ira," the " Marseillaise," 
and the " Carmagnole." The toasts were thirteen in 

1 C. 158. 2 "Englishmen in the French Revolution," 1889. 

3 Papiers trouvis chez Robespierre. 



326 PARIS IN 1789-94 

number x — the French Republic, founded on the rights of 
man ; the French armies, and the destruction of tyrants 
and tyranny ; the National Convention ; the coming 
Convention of England and Ireland ; the union of France, 
Great Britain, and Belgium, and may neighbouring nations 
join in the same sentiments ; the Republic of Men, accom- 
panied by an English song to the air of the " Marseillaise," 
composed by an English lady ; 2 the dissolution of the 
Germanic Circle, and may their inhabitants be free ; 
abolition of hereditary titles throughout the world (pro- 
posed by Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Sir R. Smyth) ; 
Lord E. Fitzgerald and Sir R. Smyth ; Thomas Paine, and 
the new way of making good books known by royal 
proclamations and by prosecuting the authors in the 
King's Bench ; the Women of Great Britain, particularly 
those who have distinguished themselves by their writings 
in favour of the French revolution, Mrs. [Charlotte] Smith 
and Miss H. M. Williams ; the Women of France, especially 
those who have had the courage to take up arms to defend 
the cause of liberty, citoyennes Fernig, Anselme, &c; and 
Universal Peace, based on universal liberty. The pro- 
gramme must also have included " the Patriots of England, 
especially those who have distinguished themselves by 
their writings and speeches in propagating the doctrines 
of the French revolution, Fox, Sheridan, Cooper, Barlow, 
Tooke, and Mackintosh"; but this was evidently objected 
to and omitted, for when Burke in the House of Commons 
twitted Fox and Sheridan with having been toasted at this 
dinner, Sheridan referred him to a letter 3 in which Oswald 
said : — 

We did not drink these toasts, nor could we do so without 
falling into a signal absurdity. Met to celebrate the rapid progress 
of the eternal principles of liberty and equality, how could we think 
of cringing to the heads or tools of any party? How could we 
pronounce the names of Fox, Sheridan, and Mackintosh ? 

But what interests us more than the toasts was the 

1 Patriote Francais, November 21, 1792. 
2 Probably Helen Williams. 3 Patriote Francois, November 26. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 327 

adoption of an address to the Convention. It was in these 
terms l : — 

Address of the English, Scotch, and Irish resident and 
domiciled in Paris. 

Citizen Legislators, — The British and Irish citizens now in 
Paris, animated by the sentiment of liberty which your principles 
have imparted to the French republic, assembled on Sunday, 18th 
November, to celebrate the brilliant successes of your arms, and 
were unanimously of opinion that it was their duty to offer to the 
representatives of so great a nation the tribute of their con- 
gratulations on events which essentially interest all peoples who 
aspire to be free. Receive, then, citizen legislators, this pure and 
fraternal homage of men who have ever applauded the sacred 
principles upon which you have sworn to base the new government 
which you are about to give to your country. Hitherto wars have 
been undertaken only to satiate the vilest passions ; they have 
consequently been conducted only by the most iniquitous methods. 
You have taken up arms solely to make reason and truth triumph. 
It doubtless appertained to the French nation to enfranchise 
Europe, and we rejoice to see it fulfilling its great destinies. Let 
us hope that the victorious troops of liberty will lay down their 
arms only when there are no more tyrants or slaves. Of all 
these pretended governments, works of the fraud of priests and 
coalesced tyrants, there will soon remain only a shameful memory. 
Peoples enlightened by your example will blush to have bowed 
servile heads so long under a yoke debasing for human nature. 

Our good wishes, citizen legislators, render us impatient to see 
the happy moment of this great change, in the hope that it will no 
sooner arrive than we shall see the formation of a close union 
between the French republic and the English, Scotch, and Irish 
nations, a union which cannot fail to ensure entire Europe the 
enjoyment of the rights of man and establish on the firmest bases 
universal peace. We are not the only men animated by these senti- 
ments. We doubt not that they would be also manifested by the 

1 C. 242. The address, apparently in Stone's writing, fills a page and a half 
of a sheet of foolscap, the ink now much faded. The signatures from Tweddell 
to Rayment occupy in two columns the rest of the second page, the remaining 
names being written on the other half of the sheet in a single column, and the 
president and secretary signing at the top of a second column. Stone and 
O'Reilly, it will be observed, inadvertently sign twice over. The version of the 
address given in the Moniteur contains some slight inaccuracies. 



328 



PARIS IN 1789-94 



great majority of our countrymen if public opinion were consulted, 
as it ought to be, in a national convention. 

As for us, who are at present making Paris our residence, we 
gladly embrace this opportunity of declaring that in the whole 
course of the Revolution, and notwithstanding the abrupt departure 
of our ambassador, we have constantly experienced on the part of 
the French nation sentiments of the frankest cordiality and sincerest 
friendship. 

Paris, 24th November 1792, first year of the French republic. 
Signed by us, members of the committee nominated for that 
purpose. 



Francis Tweddell. 
Matthew Bellewes. 
John Frost. 
Richard Joyce. 
Joseph Green. 
J. Skill. 

J. Usher Quaterman. 
David Gibson. 
Thomas Armfield. 
Edward Fitzgerald. 
William Duckett. 
J. O'Neill. 
Edward Ferris. 
B. Murray. 
J. H. Stone, President. 
Joseph Webb. 
William Newton. 

J. TlCKELL. 

Harold Mowatt. 
Pearce Lower. 
Bernard MacSheehy. 
Jeremie Curtayn. 
William Choppin. 
William Wardell. 
N. Madgett. 
James Gamble. 
(Wait for the President's reply 



Thos. MacDermott. 

William Ricketts. 

Robert Rayment. 

William Francis Jackson. 

Robert Merry. 

Robert May O'Reilly. 

J. E. Macdonnel. 

William Watts. 

Thomas Marshall. 

John Oswald. 

John Walker, sen. 

Thomas Potier. 

L. Masquerier. 

R. Smyth. 

N. Hickson. 

T. J. Gastineau. 

Stephen Sayre. 

Henry Sheares. 

John Sheares. 

Rose. 

John Bradley. 

William Maxwell. 

B. Bulmer. 

CAESAR COLCLOUGH. 

J. H. Stone, President. 
Robert M. O'Reilly, Secretary. 1 

) 



1 David Williams, the Unitarian minister, the friend of Condorcet and 
Madame Roland, was in Paris at this time, and till the 1st February 1793, but 
apparently kept away from the dinner as being too Jacobinical in tone. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 329 

The address was not presented till the 28th. This 
delay may be attributed to a resolution to wait for the 
arrival of Joel Barlow and John Frost, 1 who on 9th 
November had been deputed by the London Society for 
the Diffusion of Constitutional Information to take over 
another address. They wrote on the 27th from White's 
Hotel to the president of the Convention, asking that a 
day might be arranged for receiving them. The following 
day at noon was fixed. Both addresses were accordingly 
presented on the 28th. First came Stone and the forty- 
nine other members of the White's Hotel committee. 
Thomas Paine had doubtless been at the meeting, for we 
have seen that his health was drunk, but himself sitting in 
the Convention, he obviously could not sign an address 
to that body. 

The address from London was doubtless read by 
Barlow. The version published by the Moniteur (29th 
November 1792) contains numerous inaccuracies, but 
without detailing these it is enough to say that the society 
had subscribed a thousand pounds to buy shoes for the 
French soldiers, and promised to send a thousand weekly 
for at least six weeks till the money was exhausted. 

Before seeing what became of the memorialists let 
us note the history of these gatherings at White's. The 
chief authority is Captain George Monro, who, on the 
withdrawal of the British embassy in August 1792, had 
been left in Paris to send information to his government. 
" I have sent a very good man," wrote Bland Burges to 
Lord Auckland on 17th August 1792, "to look about 
him in Paris after they [Lord Gower and Lindsay] 
come away, and who will let us know from day to day 
what passes." 2 It was evidently part of Monro's duty 
to keep an eye on British visitors, and, if this made him 
virtually a spy, it was natural that the English authorities 
should desire to be posted up in the movements of men, 
some of whom, as he wrote, were " ready to put anything in 

1 A blank must have been left for Frost's signature. 

2 Auckland's "Journals." 



330 PARIS IN 1789-94 

execution that would injure their country, let the measure 
be never so desperate." The better, therefore, to discharge 
his duty, Monro actually went to lodge at White's. He 
was doubtless present at the dinner of 28th November, 
and he forwarded to the Foreign Office a copy of the 
address to the Convention, but without the signatures. 
On 17th December he reported that the "party of con- 
spirators" had "formed themselves into a society." We 
know from the Moniteur (xv. 58) that on 5th January 
they gave formal notice of the formation of the society, 
which was to meet twice a week. A meeting had been 
held on 16th December, when the president of the Mail 
section delivered a speech, a copy of which was forwarded 
to the Foreign Office by Monro. Merry was president, 
and a Dr. Edwards had arrived to join Maxwell ; but 
Paine was then staying in the provinces, "ill or pretending 
to be so," Stone had returned to England, and Frost 
had removed to cheaper lodgings. On 27th December 
Monro reports that many of the party had become friends 
of royalty, though there were still many " who would stand 
at nothing to ruin their country." Four days later he 
describes the remnant as "beneath the notice of any one, 
struggling for consequence among themselves, jealous of 
one another, differing in opinion, and even insignificant in 
a body." With few exceptions they were "heartily tired 
of politics and addresses. Tom Paine's fate [outlawry] 
and the unanimity of the English has staggered the boldest 
of them, and they are now dwindling into nothing." On 
nth January 1793 another address was advocated by Paine 
and Merry, but was so warmly opposed by Frost and 
Macdonald (Macdonnel) that "the dispute nearly ended 
in blows. I cannot tell how it ended, as things are kept 
very secret." l Henry Redhead Yorke tells us the par- 
ticulars. The address invited the Convention to liberate 
enslaved England. He opposed it, and "we carried it" — 
that is to say, the address was rejected — "by a majority of 
one." It was, however, again brought forward, whereupon 

1 O. Browning, " Despatches of Earl Gower." 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 331 

Yorke and Johnson drew up a remonstrance and seceded. 
This second address was presented to the Convention 
on 22nd January, but I have not found it in the National 
Archives. 

I have, however, found at the British Museum, in a 
collection of " Political Broadsides," a copy of a placard 
which was posted on London dead-walls. It read thus : — 

Friends of the Rights of Man associated at Paris, December 4, 
first year of the French Republic. 

We whose names are subscribed to this declaration, for the 
greater part natives of Great Britain and Ireland, and now resident 
in Paris, sensible of the duties we owe to our countrymen, as well 
as to the general cause of liberty and happiness through the world, 
have formed ourselves into a society for the express purpose of col- 
lecting political information and extending it to the people at large 
in the several nations to which we belong. 

We are happy that our temporary residence in this enlightened 
and regenerated capital enables us to become the organ of com- 
municating knowledge on the most interesting subjects, of ad- 
ministering to the moral improvement and social happiness of a 
considerable portion of our fellow-men, and of undeceiving the 
mind of our countrymen, abused by the wretched calumnies of 
a wicked Administration who, in order to perpetuate the slavery 
of the English, have made it their business to stigmatise the 
glorious exertions of the French. 

We begin with an open and unequivocal declaration of the 
principles which animate our conduct, and precise definition of the 
object we mean to pursue, that no individual in any country may 
mistake our motives or be ignorant in what manner to address 
us. We declare that an equal Government, unmixed with any 
kind of exclusive privileges, conducted by the whole body of the 
people or by their agents, chosen at frequent periods and subject 
to their recall, is the only Government proper for man ; that the 
British and Irish nations do not enjoy such a Government ; that 
they cannot obtain it until a National Convention be chosen and 
assembled to lay its foundations on the basis of the Rights of Man ; 
that to effect this great and indispensable object we will use all the 
means which reason, argument, and the communication of informa- 
tion can supply; that we will endeavour to remove all national 



332 PARIS IN 1789-94 

prejudices which it has been the interest of tyrants to excite in order 
to separate and enslave the great family of Man ; that we invite 
individuals and societies of every name and description in the above 
nations and elsewhere to a manly and unreserved correspondence 
with our society ; and we pledge ourselves to them and to the 
universe that no composition or sacrifice extorted from the fears of 
expiring Oppression shall seduce or deter us from persevering with 
firmness and constancy in the discharge of the important duty we 
have undertaken. 

Here follow the signatures. 

These, unfortunately, are not given. 

A London bookseller named Thompson arrived about 
this time, and denounced Monro as a spy who "had joined 
the society to find out what they were doing." Monro's 
despatches cease in February 1793, and he then returned 
to England, his place being taken by one Somers, who, 
until the end of February, wrote letters to Monro and 
Bland Burges, using mercantile terms to disguise political 
news. Monro is said, indeed, to have been arrested, and to 
have owed his release to Paine, 1 but his apprehension 
was not ordered by the Committee of General Security till 
9th May 1793, 2 and the search which was then to be made 
for him at the Cafe Anglais, Palais Royal, was evidently 
ineffectual. One of Monro's latest items of information 
was the arrival of Sampson Perry, of whom we shall hear 
more in connection with Choppin. 

The club was dissolved after a warm discussion in 
February 1793, but some further light is thrown on the 
English gatherings at White's by a long denunciation made 
to the Place Vendome section on 8th March 1794 by 
Arthur, a member of the Commune, of English extraction, 
who seems to have made it his business to play the spy on 
British residents. Arthur depicted Stone as a man pre- 
tending sympathy with the Revolution, but intimate with 
Brissot and Potion, and especially with General Miranda. 
He was also intimate with Milnes, whom the intercepted 

1 Conway's " Life of Paine." 2 A.F. ii.* 288. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 333 

Lille letters had shown to be an agent of Pitt. 1 Stone 
was also intimate with Robert Smith [Sir Robert Smyth], 
now arrested. Milnes gave dinners and balls nearly all the 
week at White's, a kind of English tavern in the Passage 
des Petits Peres, now called Hotel Philadelphie. At one of 
these orgies [sic] a dispute arose between Thomas Paine 
and another Englishman, who struck Paine in the face, 
but after escaping and being for some time in concealment 
had become reconciled with Paine. Stone kept his carriage 
before the Revolution, but had now opened a printing 
office, and had claimed his wife's release, as being himself 
a compositor (artisans were exempt from arrest). Stone, 
however, was about to divorce her, and doubtless intended 
to marry again. She had brought him ^600 or ^800. 
Gamble, the engraver, was co-proprietor with White, 
having been surety for him. 2 

The Place Vendome section committee not only entered 
this long statement, which I have summarised, on its 
minutes, but ordered a copy to be sent to the General 
Security Committee. It is obviously a mixture of fact and 
fiction. Paine's assailant was Captain John Grimston, R.A., 
for Sherwin in his " Life of Paine " states that Grimston, 
at an hotel dinner, struck Paine, and might have been 

1 Here Arthur seems to have confused William Miles, who had been in Paris 
in 1791, and in 1793 had received a pension of .£300 for his quasi-diplomatic 
services, with James Milne, or Mylne, an English mechanician, who, prior to the 
Revolution, had introduced spinning and carding machines, and had received 
a pension of 300 francs. That pension was confirmed by the Assembly in August 
1 791, and in the previous May it had ordered a competitive trial between his 
spinning machine and that of a fellow Englishman, Philemon Pickford. The 
latter received 3000 francs for erecting his machine in a room at the Paris 
hospital. Milne died at Paris in 1804, his sons continuing the business. He 
seems to have been allowed a building at the royal shooting-box of La Muette for 
his factory, for on 20th February 1793 he addressed a complaint respecting this 
to the Convention, which, however, declined to consider it. He had probably 
been ousted from La Muette. The Lille letters, which really seem to have been 
the lost property of an English spy, said : " Milne's plans are approved of by Pitt, 
but his late fever will keep him in England some time longer." This possibly 
refers to William Miles, whose Memoirs were published in 1891. There was, 
however, a Captain Miles, a member of the Constitutional Information Society, 
who may have visited Paris. 

2 F. 7, 2475, p. 137. 



334 PARIS IN 1789-94 

punished with death, but that Paine procured him a passport 
and paid for his journey back to England. These last 
details require confirmation, but we see that the quarrel 
was made up, and the records of the General Security 
Committee show that Grimston, who was living with a 
Captain Bingham at St. Germain, was summoned to appear 
before it on 9th May 1793, and on the 16th was ordered to 
quit Paris within seven and France within fourteen days. 
He was to have a passport for any destination he might 
choose. 1 Some of Arthur's gossip was thus ten months 
old. The hotel-keeper White was arrested on 9th May 
1793, 2 probably on account of the Grimston affair. A 
Christopher White, manufacturer, aged 20, imprisoned 
from October 1793 to November 1794, may have been his 
son, and Anna Gray, wife of White, aged 43, incarcerated 
during the same period with her two daughters, aged 16 
and 14, was probably the hotel-keeper's wife. 

In tracing the antecedents and subsequent careers of 
the members of the deputation the alphabetical order will 
be most convenient, for the signatures to the address show 
no arrangement of any kind ; but I may make an exception 
for two men, so well known that little need be said of them 
— William Francis Jackson and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. 
Monro, strangely enough, does not mention Jackson, whose 
name heads the second page of signatures, yet he can 
scarcely have been any other than the Rev. William Jackson, 
ex-factotum to the notorious Duchess of Kingston, who, 
originally clerk at a Moravian chapel in London, 3 went to 
Oxford, but did not graduate, was curate at St. Mary-le- 
Strand, wrote for or edited the Public Ledger, Morning Post, 
and Whitehall Evening Post, and was a prisoner for debt in 
the King's Bench. It is true that this Jackson is nowhere 
credited with a second Christian name, but there can 
scarcely have been two William Jacksons in Paris, both 
Jacobins to boot. He must also have been the Jackson 
who, along with a Frenchman named Gamier, had on nth 
May 1792 submitted to the Assembly a scheme for obtaining 

1 A.F. ii.* 28S. 2 Ibid. 3 Andrews, " History of British Journalism." 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 335 

news in twenty-four hours from the most distant fron- 
tier. This apparently anticipated Chappe's invention of 
semaphore signals, but the Assembly declined to entertain 
it. In August 1793 he obtained exemption from the general 
arrest of British subjects, as being in the employ of the 
French government. Jackson's mission to Ireland in 1795, 
his misplaced confidence in Cockayne, a London attorney, 
his conviction, and his suicide in the dock at Dublin to 
save his family x from the confiscation of his small property, 
are well known. 2 His acquaintance with Paine at White's 
Hotel lends additional pathos to the employment of his 
prison hours in writing an answer to the "Age of Reason." 
Paine, indeed, had then told him that he was writing a 
book against all revealed religion as nothing but nonsense 
and imposture. 

It is needless to summarise the career of so well-known 
a man as Lord Edward Fitzgerald. It is enough to speak 
of his brief visit to Paris. He arrived on 26th October 
1792, and gave his address as le citoyen Edouard Fitzgerald, 
Hotel de White, Passage des Petits Peres, pres du Palais 
Royal. " I lodge," he wrote to his mother, the Duchess of 
Leinster, " with my friend Paine ; we breakfast, dine, and 
sup together. ... I pass my time very quietly ; read, walk, 
and go quietly to the play. ... I go a good deal to the 
Assembly." A subsequent letter, undated, says, " I dine 
to-day with Madame Sillery." According to the latter, 
better known as Madame de Genlis, Fitzgerald, at a per- 
formance of Kreutzer's Italian opera " Lodoiska," was 
struck by a face closely resembling that of Sheridan's 
recently deceased wife, of whom he had been enamoured. 
He found that this was the famous Pamela, the reputed 
daughter of the Duke of Orleans and Madame de Genlis, 
but more probably, as has been ascertained of late years, 
the offspring of a Newfoundland fisherman's daughter 

1 Whom he had apparently left behind in Paris, for he handed a letter to his 
counsel MacNally (secretly in the pay of the British Government), in which he 
besought friends in Paris to succour his wife, child, and an unborn infant. 

2 See "Dictionary of National Biography," xxix. no, III ; and Fitzpatrick's 
" Secret Service under Pitt." 



336 PARIS IN 1789-94 

named Sims. 1 He got Stone, who was also at the theatre, to 
introduce him to her. Now " Lodoiska," which was brought 
out in 1791, had had a run of more than fifty nights, was 
revived on 1st November 1792, and was repeated on 20th 
December. If Madame de Genlis' account is to be relied 
on, Fitzgerald's introduction to Pamela must have taken 
place on 1st November. But this would not agree with 
her statement that on her leaving Paris with Pamela for 
Tournay, two or three days afterwards, he joined them at 
the first post, that they reached Tournay in the begin- 
ning of December, and that three weeks after he married 
Pamela. Madame de Genlis' stay in Paris was extremely 
short, for she was liable to arrest as an dmigree. She could 
not have been there on 1st November. " Lodoiska," there- 
fore, could not have been the piece at which the introduc- 
tion occurred. This is not a material point. Madame de 
Genlis is less excusably inaccurate when she asserts that 
she would not give Fitzgerald her adoptive daughter's hand 
till he had obtained his mother's consent, that he accord- 
ingly went over to England to secure this, and that he 
returned in a few days. Fitzgerald's letter to his mother, 
written on arriving in London with his bride on 2nd 
January 1793, implies that the duchess's consent, or rather 
recognition, had only that day been given. It is clear that 
Fitzgerald had not gone to London to obtain her previous 
consent, but had married on 27th December either without 
asking consent or without waiting for the answer. 2 As to 
the British dinner, the London newspapers represented 
Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Sir Robert Smyth as having 
there renounced their titles in conformity with the toast for 
the abolition of all hereditary titles. This led to Fitzgerald 
being cashiered from the army. 

Of Thomas Armfield, 3 Matthew Bellewes, B. Bulmer, 

1 "Dictionary of National Biography," xix. 142, 143 ; Academy, 1892. 

2 The due de Chartres, the future King Louis-Philippe, was present, and 
signed the register. 

3 A Sophia Armfield, buried at Montmartre cemetery in 1810, at the age of 
92, had apparently a brother, for she is described as a " dutiful daughter, good 
sister, and sincere friend." 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 337 

and John Bradley nothing is known. Bulmer may have 
been the father of a well-known printer, William Bulmer, 
or the Blackett Bulmer imprisoned at Arras. I pass on to 
William Choppin, who became curiously mixed up in the 
trial of Marat. Born in 1764, full of enthusiasm for the 
Revolution, and a member of the London Constitutional 
Information Society, he seems to have migrated with Paine 
from White's Hotel to lodgings in the faubourg St. Denis. 
There, at any rate, they were fellow-lodgers in April 1793, 
together with Johnson, a young surgeon from Derby, who 
had accompanied Redhead Yorke to Paris. Johnson 
stabbed himself twice with a knife, and announced to 
Choppin from the top of the stairs that he had killed 
himself. As though dying, he gave Paine his watch and 
drew up a will dividing his personal effects between Paine 
and Choppin. This will contained the following passage : 
" I came to France to enjoy liberty, but Marat has mur- 
dered it. I cannot endure the grievous spectacle of the 
triumph of imbecility and inhumanity over talent and 
virtue." Paine, moreover, gave Brissot, for publication in 
his Patriote Frangais, a paragraph drawn up by Johnson 
himself to the effect that an Englishman, abjuring his 
country from detestation of kings, but heartbroken to find 
in France the hideous mask of anarchy, had resolved 
on suicide, and before dying had written these words. 
Johnson was really alive and well, and is said to have been 
annoyed at the appearance of the paragraph, but he had 
himself indited it and had begun the mystification. 1 
Marat's trial came on just at this time, and the perfectly 
irrelevant question of this sham suicide was dragged into 
it. Paine, Choppin, Johnson, and Sampson Perry were 
called as witnesses. 2 Perry, in an unpublished letter to a 
Madame Lavit, 3 might well say : " On the whole it is a 

1 Johnson's own account was that he was excited by the fear that Paine would; 
lose his life for his vote in favour of Louis XVI. 

2 Moniteur, 3rd May, 1793; Arch. Nat., W. 269. Paine, unlike his three 
fellow-countrymen, had to be examined through two interpreters, and knowing,, 
perhaps, that he would be a witness, he had not voted in the Convention on the 
prosecution of Marat. 3 W. 269. 

Y 



1« 



338 PARIS IN 1789-94 

mysterious affair, and ought to be cleared up. Some 
people regard it as a farce, others as a tragedy." Choppin 
and Johnson left Paris for Switzerland in November 1793, 
just in time to escape detention. 1 Yorke, " from motives 
of personal delicacy," refrained from publishing Paine's 
account of the episode, which he had been allowed to copy 
from Paine's essay, " Forgetfulness," an essay which was 
never published, and the manuscript of which has disap- 
peared. We only know from the passages given by Yorke 
that Johnson and Choppin were arrested in the autumn of 
1793, when all Englishmen were seized as hostages for 
Toulon, but were released on a certificate from Paine. 
Sanson, the executioner, called on Paine on this occasion. 2 
A guard went subsequently to rearrest them, but they had 
fortunately left two days before for Switzerland. 3 They 
wrote from Bale to Paine, as he informed Lady Smyth, 
"highly pleased with their escape from France, into which 
they had entered with an enthusiasm of patriotic devotion." 
Choppin in 1787 had presented Rickman with a silver pen, 
inscribed, " In the just cause only," and in 1803, when 
living in London, he subscribed to Rickman's poems. 
Johnson, a resident at Kensington, was also a subscriber. 

Caesar Colclough, eldest son of Vesey Colclough, of 
Tintern abbey, county Wexford (commonly called Sir 
Vesey, as heir male of the last baronet, though the title did 
not descend to him), was born in 1766. His mother was 
Catherine, daughter of John Grogan, of Johnstown, Wex- 
ford. Vesey was high sheriff of Wexford in 1767, and M.P. 
for that county from 1769 till his death in 1794. Caesar 
was imprisoned at Paris with the other British subjects. 
He amused himself with carpentry, and taking back that 
taste with him to Ireland on his release, he made a part of 
Tintern abbey his workshop. Many of his tools remained 
there long after his death. During his residence in France 
his younger brother John represented Wexford, and in 
1807 stood for re-election, nominating Sheridan as his 

1 Conway, "Life of Paine." a See p. 37. 

3 Conway's "Writings of Paine," iii. 318. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 339 

colleague, in opposition to the other outgoing member, 
William Congreve Alcock. On the morning of the election 
there was a duel between Colclough and Alcock, in which 
the former was killed. Alcock, who was elected, was put 
on trial, but was acquitted. The legend runs that remorse 
made him insane, 1 but he did not become insane till 
November 1809, and in April 181 1 some electors peti- 
tioned the House of Commons to declare the seat vacant. 
There was, however, no precedent for such exclusion since 
1560, and no new writ was issued till the dissolution in 1812. 
This tragic event probably led to or hastened Caesar's 
return to look after the embarrassed estate left by his 
extravagant brother. In 1818 he became himself M.P. for 
Wexford, and in the same year married Jane Stratford, 
daughter of John Kirwan, barrister. He died at Chelten- 
ham in 1842, leaving no issue. He was buried at Tintern 
abbey, and his widow erected a monument to his memory 
in Tintern parish church. 2 The estate then devolved on 
Mary Grey Wentworth, daughter of another Caesar Col- 
clough, chief justice of Newfoundland ; she married in 
1848 John Thomas Rossborough, who took the name of 
Colclough. 

Passing over Jeremie Curtayn, we come to William 
Duckett, who, born at Killarney in 1768, was educated at 
the Irish college, gained a scholarship at St. Barbe college, 
and returning to Ireland wrote flaming articles in the 
Northern Star, under the signature of Junius Redivivus, till 
prudence dictated, in or before 1796, a flight back to Paris. 
There he was busy in inciting a French landing in Ireland, 
but Tone had an invincible distrust of him, and prevented 
his embarking in Hoche's expedition, though he went as far 
as Rennes for that purpose. Tone thus rendered Duckett 
an unconscious service. In 1797 he was secretary to Leo- 
nard Bourdon, ex-schoolmaster and Jacobin deputy. In 
1798 Duckett was reported to Castlereagh as at Hamburg 

1 Barrington, " Personal Sketches." 

2 Information kindly furnished by Mrs. Biddulph Colclough, of Tintern 
abbey. 



34Q PARIS IN 1789-94 

and as entrusted with money for procuring a mutiny in 
the English fleet or for burning English dockyards. He 
was consequently scheduled in the Irish Outlawry Act. 
Returning to Paris with a Danish wife about 1803, he 
became a professor at his resuscitated college of St. Barbe, 
and Duruzoir, a pupil, speaks admiringly of his wonderful 
memory, his classical attainments — Horace was his favourite 
author — and his lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. He 
also wrote verses on topics of the day, and compiled an 
English grammar for French students. He died in 1841. 1 

Edward Ferris may have been the disbarred attorney 
and informer against the United Irishmen who received 
frequent payments out of secret service money. 2 He may 
also have been related to Richard Ferris, of the Irish college, 
Paris, seminarist, priest, soldier, and married man, whose 
singular career ended in 1828. 3 But this is mere conjecture. 

John Frost, a native of Winchester, brought up as a 
solicitor, and described as " an attorney of electioneering 
memory," became in 1782, at the age of thirty-two, a 
member of the Thatched House tavern society in London, 
a body advocating parliamentary reform. In 1792 he is 
said to have sheltered political offenders. He accompanied 
Paine to Paris in September 1792, when both were rudely 
searched at Dover. 4 One of the founders and the secretary 
of the Corresponding Society, he paid Barlow's expenses to 
Paris, as well as his own, on their being deputed to present 
the address. Burke denounced him as an ambassador to 
Louis XVI. 's murderers. Stone, in a letter of 26th November 
to his brother William, produced at the trial of the latter, 
mentioned Frost's arrival. Monro on 17th December 1793 
writes : — 

Mr. Frost has left this house [White's], and seldom makes his 
appearance. He is, however, one of the society. He appears, 
however, a good deal alarmed at his situation, as he told me a 
reward was offered for apprehending him. 

1 " Diet, of National Biography," xvi. 92. 

2 Fitzpatrick's "Secret Service under Pitt." 

3 See my " Englishmen in the French Revolution," p. 167. 

4 "Dropmore MSS." (Hist. MSS. Commission), ii. 316. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 341 

Before leaving London with the address, Frost, at the Percy 
coffee-house, had declaimed in favour of equality and 
against monarchy. A man named Butler took him by the 
nose and kicked him out. As Frost had been dining and 
was "probably drunk," 1 this would seem to have been 
sufficient punishment ; but on his return to London in 
February 1793 he was arrested for seditious talk, was in- 
effectually defended by Erskine, and was sentenced on the 
19th June to six months' imprisonment, with exposure in 
the pillory at Charing Cross. A placard issued by his 
sympathisers announced the ceremony : — 

Dec. 5, 1793- 
This day at 1 2 o'clock John Frost is to stand on the pillory at 
Charing Cross for supporting the rights of the people. 

The exhibition seems to have been postponed, for a 
second placard, dated December 18, says : — 

This day at n o'clock John Frost is to stand on the pillory at 
Charing Cross, living or dead. 

He was also struck off the roll of attorneys, and re- 
quired on the expiration of his sentence to give sureties for 
five years for good behaviour. On his release the mob 
unharnessed the horses of his carriage and dragged him in 
triumph to Thelwall's house. In 1794 the report of the 
parliamentary committee on sedition referred to his French 
mission, and he was imprisoned in the Tower with Home 
Tooke and other members of the Corresponding Society, 2 
but the prosecution against him was abandoned on the 
acquittal of the first batch of prisoners. In 1802 he was an 
unsuccessful candidate for East Grinstead. In 1813 he 
received a royal pardon, and applied for reinstatement on 
the roll of attorneys, but this the King's Bench refused. 
Tranquil for the rest of his long life, Frost expired in 1842 
at Holly Lodge, near Lymington. Dr. S. R. Gardiner, the 
historian, remembered him there as a very old man, living 
with an elderly daughter and a little granddaughter. He 

1 " Dropmore MSS.," ii. 340. 

2 See Tooke's Diary, "Notes and Queries," January and February 1897. 



342 PARIS IN 1789-94 

had taken the name of Russell, to keep his past out of 
sight. His Chartist namesake of 1839 was not his kinsman. 

James Gamble was a paper-maker and engraver, and 
occupied part of the premises of Arthur and Robert, at the 
boulevard corner of the rue Louis-le-Grand, or rue des 
Piques. We have seen how treacherously Arthur profited 
by the intimacy thus established. An English clergyman 
(William Jackson ?) who advertised lessons in English in 
1791, gave Gamble as a referee. Maria Gamble, governess 
to the children of Jules Didot, the printer, and eventually 
Didot's second wife, was probably his sister. A Paris 
newspaper of 1790 described Gamble as the inventor of 
coloured prints. On 22nd May of the previous year he 
had been licensed to publish a collection of engravings. 1 
Later on, with a partner named Coypel or Coipel, he pub- 
lished revolutionary scenes and allegories, and on 18th 
January 1795 they presented to the Convention a sketch of 
Brutus condemning his son to death. They asked permis- 
sion to buy a sheet of copper from the State in order to 
engrave it. The application was referred to the Education 
committee. 2 In 1798 a valuable timepiece was stolen from 
Gamble's house at Passy. After this nothing more is heard 
of him, but in 1801 and 1803 a John Gamble of Leicester 
Square, London, perhaps a brother of James, took out 
patents for " making paper in a continuous sheet." 

I pass over Gastineau, Gibson, 3 Green, a member of the 
Constitutional Information Society, Hickson, Joyce, and 
Lower, except to say that Nicholas Hickson, a teacher of 
languages, was imprisoned at the Scotch college and the 
Luxembourg from October 1793 to November 1795 ; and 
that Joyce was probably, to judge from their common sym- 
pathy with the Revolution, one of the brothers of Jeremiah 
Joyce, the Unitarian minister and schoolbook compiler 
prosecuted for treason in 1794. Nicholas Joyce, a cotton- 
spinner, who died a prisoner at the Benedictine convent in 
February 1794, may have been another brother. 

1 Tuetey, Repertoire Hist. Paris, ii. 376. 2 Proces- Verbaux de la Convention. 
8 There was a Gibson in business in Paris in 1798- 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 343 

Thomas MacDermott was probably the Irish militia 
colonel who was arrested by the Temple section on 4th 
May 1794. There was, however, another Thomas MacDer- 
mott, an Irish priest, who had been chaplain to the French 
embassy at London. This MacDermott was arrested at 
Nancy in June 1793, and sent a protest to the Convention. 1 
Among his papers 2 was a draft letter to his brother, a 
Dublin lawyer, asking him, as his heir, to provide for one 
Margaret Noel in return for her services to himself. He 
seems to have kept a school in Paris in 1800. 

Of Macdonnel, who, like Frost, opposed the second 
address to the Convention, all we know is that, according 
to Monro, he wrote for the Morning Post. 

Bernard MacSheehy, probably a nephew of John Bap- 
tist MacSheehy, court physician, was born in Ireland on 
2nd December 1774. He was in 1793 a student at the Irish 
college. Arrested in September of that year, he offered to 
join the French army. On 4th May 1794 the Public Safety 
Committee appointed him an interpreter on the staff of 
General Felix for the projected expedition to the East 
Indies. In 1796, being on Hoche's staff, he was sent to 
Ireland to ascertain the probabilities of a rising. 3 Lewis 
and Reilly accompanied him as far as London. On 
17th March 1798 he was appointed on the staff of the 
armee cFAngleterre, and in 1803 he was commissioned to 
organise the Irish legion at Brest, but Miles Byrne, who 
served under him, describes him as " capricious, passionate, 
and vindictive." After a duel with a fellow-officer in 1804 
he was transferred to a French regiment, and on 8th 
February 1807 MacSheehy, who had risen to be general, 
lost his life in the battle of Eylau. 4 John Bernard Mac- 
Sheehy, who entered the French army in 1802, and in 1817 
was on half-pay, was perhaps his nephew. 

Nicholas Madgett, born at Kinsale in 1767, had pro- 
bably been a student at the Irish college. He held a 
benefice near Bordeaux, but from 1784 to 1788 he was 

1 A. F. iii. 57. 2 T. 1651. 3 A. F. iii.,i86 B. 

4 Archives du D<Zp6t de la Guerre. 



344 PARIS IN 1789-94 

chaplain to James Fanning, an Irishman who had pur- 
chased the chateau of Roche-Talbot, near Sabld. 1 In May 
1795 he revisited France, landing with a passport under the 
name of Hurst. He was consequently, as a suspected spy, 
imprisoned for six months. He was intimate with Tone, 
and when the expedition to Ireland was being prepared was 
despatched to Orleans to prevail on Irish prisoners there to 
join it. This caused a quarrel between the English and the 
Irish prisoners, and the transfer of the English to Valen- 
ciennes. Madgett in 1796 advertised himself as a teacher 
of languages and mathematics. He was employed by the 
Directory in drawing up reports on English matters, and 
in translating from English newspapers. 2 In the • ■ Castle- 
reagh Memoirs " he is described, under date 1798, as 
having spent forty of his sixty years in France, and as 
intimate with Thomas Muir, the Scottish refugee. He 
suggested the seizure in the Bank of Venice of .£10,000,000, 
belonging, as he said, to George III., and this suggestion 
was transmitted by the Directory to Bonaparte, who, how- 
ever, found no such deposit. In 181 1 he is described in 
the Paris Directory as interpreter to the Ministry of 
Marine. 

Thomas Marshall, born in 1755, a native of Bentham, 
Yorkshire, was apparently in business in Paris, for in 1795 
he obtained from the Public Safety Committee a passport 
available for three months for Denmark for private affairs. 
He seems to have been intimate with Rayment, for on 8th 
September 1793 they presented a joint memorial to the 
Convention respecting a contemplated loan by the Obser- 
vatory section for the equipment of soldiers for Vendee. 
The memorial was referred to the Finance committee. 

Louis Masquerier, a descendant from Huguenot refugees, 
was a goldsmith in Coventry Street, London, who had 
become bankrupt in 1777, and had since 1789 been de- 
pendent on his wife and daughter, who taught English in 
Paris. This is all we know of him, but of his third and 
youngest son, John James, the portrait painter, much might 

1 Beauchesne, Chdteati de Roche-Talbot. 2 A. F. iii. 57-58. 






THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 345 

be said. The boy had accompanied his mother and sister 
to Paris, and at the age of fourteen was studying art under 
Francois Andre Vincent at the Royal Academy when, on 
10th August 1792, the master dismissed his pupils, saying, 
" This is no place for you." Young Masquerier on his way 
home saw a soldier shot just in front of him, and had to 
leap over the dead body. In the autumn of 1793 he 
obtained a passport for England, but his father was 
arrested, apparently dying in prison, while his mother 
and sister were imprisoned at the Luxembourg from 10th 
October 1793 to 26th October 1794, and on their release 
resumed teaching. In 1800 he revisited Paris, was enabled 
through Madame Tallien to sketch Napoleon unobserved 
from a closet, and, using this sketch for a picture of him 
reviewing the Consular Guard, made ^1000 by the exhi- 
bition of it in London. In 1814 he fetched his mother and 
sister back to England, and in 1850, in company with 
Crabb Robinson, he once more saw Paris. Five years 
later he died. 1 " More a Frenchman in speech and inti- 
mate knowledge of the country than any other friend of 
mine," says Robinson, while the poet Campbell describes 
him as " a pleasant little fellow with French vivacity." 

William Maxwell was a doctor, but I can discover 
nothing of his parentage or early life. He may have been 
the William Maxwell of Carriden, Linlithgowshire, born in 
1766, who entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1781 and 
graduated M.A. in 1791. On 12th September 1792 he 
convened by advertisement a meeting at his house in Port- 
land Street, London, to open a subscription for presenting 
arms to the French, but four hours before the time 
appointed the colonel Glover notorious in connection 
with the duchess of Kingston went to him and frightened 
him into abandoning the plan, removing his door-plate, 
and absenting himself. Glover posted himself in the house 
opposite to see what would ensue. Home Tooke was one 
of the arrivals, and after obliging Glover to decamp he con- 
ducted the people to his own house in Soho Square, where 

1 Gentleman' 's Magazine, 1855. 



346 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the meeting was held and the subscription opened. " Max- 
well's courage was unequal to the occasion," said Oswald 
at the Jacobin club on the 30th, in relating, on the autho- 
rity of Paine and Frost, what had passed. 1 Maxwell, as 
we have seen, went over to Paris, and, according to Monro, 
joined the French army in December 1792. He was in 
Louis XVI.'s escort to the scaffold, and gave a minute 
account of the execution to Oelsner, a German. Though 
devoid of sympathy for the King, he was amazed at the 
composure with which Louis entered the carriage, as if for 
an ordinary drive, gazed at the objects which he passed, 
and helped the executioner to remove his overcoat and 
jacket, for which a kind of blouse, almost pinioning his 
arms, was substituted. In 1804 a Dr. Joseph William 
Maxwell, probably the same man, obtained a passport for 
Amsterdam. 

Of Robert Merry, versifier, dramatist, Dellacruscan, and 
friend of Godwin, who visited him in Norfolk, 2 it is need- 
less to speak at length. Well known in his day, he is all 
but forgotten now. He had visited Paris in 1790, and 
had doubtless witnessed the Federation, for a letter in 
the Journal de la Societe de 1789, for August 1790, says : — 

We have here the two best poets in England, both of them 
philosophers, republicans, and friends of the Revolution. One of 
them, Mr. Merry, is at work on a poem celebrating the French 
Revolution ; it is already far advanced, and will be finished, as he 
believes, about December. 3 . . . The other, Mr. Hayley, in no 
way yields to his rival. 

Merry married in 1791 Elizabeth Brunton, a famous 
actress, and the daughter and sister of actors. He was 
president, as we have seen, of the club at White's Hotel, 
and he remained in France till May 1793, when, apparently 
having been detained at Calais, the General Safety Com- 
mittee ordered that municipality to grant him a passport, 

1 Moniteur, 25th September, 1792 ; Aulard's Club des Jacobins. 

2 C. Kegan Paul's " Life of Godwin." 

3 It appeared as an ode for 14th July 1791, and was recited at the London 
celebration. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 347 

his wife and two servants accompanying him. 1 In 1796 
Merry and his wife went to America, where the latter 
appeared on the stage. Cobbett, writing to Gifford in 
1797, 2 states that Merry arrived full of enthusiasm for 
American liberty, but was soon disenchanted, and speedily 
fell into obscurity. He died at Baltimore in 1798. He 
was a count of the Holy Roman Empire, having purchased 
that distinction for ten guineas. 3 

Mowatt, who was twenty-four years of age, had expe- 
rience of three Paris prisons. Murray, arrested in Septem- 
ber 1793, petitioned for leave to continue his studies at the 
Irish college, where his uncle had given him a bursary, as 
also to MacSheehy, his cousin. He is probably the Bar- 
tholomew Murray who was imprisoned at Arras. 

William Newton (perhaps the William Newton of 
Longdon, Devon, who entered Oriel College, Oxford, in 
1780), was a soldier of fortune who, though only thirty 
years of age, had served not only in the English dragoons 
but in the Russian army. 4 Offering his sword to the 
Convention, he was appointed cavalry captain at the 
Military School, and joined the French dragoons. On 5th 
March 1793 he was taken before the General Security 
Committee, having been found in the street wearing an 
unknown uniform with colonel's epaulettes. He was dis- 
charged, but the Minister of War was directed to dismiss 
him and to forbid his use of a uniform to which he was 
not entitled. 5 He nevertheless, in the following August, 
contracted to supply baggage waggons of a new model, 
and this contract was about to operate when the arrest of 
English residents was decreed. The Minister of the In- 
terior suggested to the Public Safety Committee that he 
should be exempted, but he was nevertheless arrested and 
confined at the Luxembourg and the Benedictine monas- 
tery from October 1793 to June 1794. He was then tried 
and executed. He is said to have exclaimed in prison, on 
reading Barrere's report on the crimes of the English 

1 A. F. ii.* 288. 2 " Memoirs of John Murray." 

3 "Early Life of Samuel Rogers." * T. 1653. 5 A. F. ii.* 288. 



348 PARIS IN 1789-94 

government, tl Has Barrere travelled, then, in England ? 
What crimes can it have committed ?" and he tore up the 
paper. He is also said to have compared Robespierre to 
oriental despots, and to have defiantly told the mob round 
the guillotine, (t I am happier than your tyrants, for they 
tremble, whereas I am quite composed." 

O'Neill may have been the officer of that name in the 
French army in 1793, and O'Reilly the " Orelly " who on 
the 19th September 1793 solicited the Convention for 
employment in the education department. 

Of John Oswald much might be said, were it not 
sufficient to refer to the " Dictionary of National Bio- 
graphy" and to the Revolution Francaise of June 1897. 
Sceptic, vegetarian, opponent of wigs and cravats, officer 
in the Indian army, traveller among Kurds and Turcomans, 
versifier, pamphleteer, this son of an Edinburgh coffee- 
house-keeper played many parts ; but I must confine 
myself to his career in France. On nth September 1790 
he presented the National Assembly with an ode on the 
"Triumph of Freedom," from which it may be inferred 
that he had witnessed the Federation of July 14, 1790. 
He interested himself in the mission to the Jacobin club 
of Watt and Cooper as representatives of a Manchester 
society. Robespierre had introduced these two delegates 
to the club, but seems afterwards to have objected to their 
request for the affiliation of their society. On 27th May, 
and again on 10th June 1792, Oswald advocated the 
despatch of an address of sympathy to Manchester. He 
repeated his efforts on 22nd August and 30th September, 
and at length on 3rd October an address was sent. If, 
as Southey asserts, there was an altercation at the club 
between Robespierre and the Manchester deputation, it 
was evidently Oswald, not the stripling Watt, who bore 
the brunt of it. In his speech of 30th September he 
denounced George III. as tyrannical and sanguinary, and 
as a man who should not have been liberated from a 
lunatic asylum; and he advocated a revolution in England 
as essential to the friendship of the two nations. He 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 349 

translated into English the Almanack du Pere Gerard, 
as also a famous revolutionary production by Collot 
d'Herbois. A memorial by Lewins, the Irish refugee, 1 
states that when the Girondins were in power, which was 
in the autumn of 1792 or spring of 1793, Paine sent Oswald 
to Ireland to offer 20,000 men to assist in securing Irish 
independence. Oswald, whom Lewins mistakenly styles 
an American, accordingly went to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, 
but Ireland was not then ripe for a rising. Oswald was 
perhaps the sham Irish Quaker mentioned by Dumont 2 
as travelling in France with a passport from Roland. In 
March 1792 he had advocated the abolition of standing 
armies and the adoption of the pike as the only weapon. 
He was authorised accordingly to raise a corps of 
volunteers in Paris, and conducted them to La Vendee. 
He had sent for two sons to join him as drummers. 
Father and sons were all killed in a skirmish at Thouars 
on the 14th September 1793, probably by their own 
battalion, for Oswald was a strict disciplinarian, and 
consequently unpopular. He had a third child ; he may 
have been the John Oswald who joined the French army 
as lieutenant in 1799, and in 1817 was on half-pay. 
Oswald was secretary to the British club till its dissolu- 
tion in February 1793. 

Of Potier and Quaterman nothing is known, except 
that Potier, a tradesman and probably a Channel Islander, 
was imprisoned with the other British subjects from the 
4th August to the 18th September 1794, and that Quater- 
man, an Irishman, after a year's captivity, was expelled 
from France in October 1794. 

Robert Rayment, born in 1737, was an economist who 
published in 1790 a treatise on the British corn trade, and 
in 1791 a work on British national income and expenditure. 
He was in Paris in August 1792, and presented the latter 
book to the Assembly. A few days later he reappeared, 
as we have seen, at the bar of that body with Gamble, 
young Watt, and Arnviside to subscribe for the widows of 

1 A. F. iv. 1672. 2 Souvenirs stir Mirabeau, cap. 16. 



350 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the captors of the Tuileries. He became connected with 
the Caisse d'Escompte, but on 19th October 1793 was 
arrested with the other English by the Lepelletier 
section, 1 and was incarcerated at the Scotch college and 
the Luxembourg till 2nd January 1795. 2 In 1796 he was 
still living in Paris. 

William Ricketts had been in the English navy. On 
the 4th November 1792 he appeared before the Convention, 
requesting French citizenship and offering to join the 
French navy. The application was referred to the Navy 
Committee, apparently without any result. On the 28th 
December 1792 he again requested French citizenship and 
the permission of the Convention to equip a vessel for the 
French navy at his own expense and under his own 
command. 3 The application was again referred to the 
Navy Committee, and nothing more is heard of it. On 
8th September 1793, in concert with Marshall, he wrote, 
as we have seen, a letter to the Convention respecting the 
equipment of volunteers for La Vendee. Was he the 
navy-captain Ricketts who in 1802 married in England a 
Miss Gumbleton, an Irishwoman ? 

Rose, who signed without his Christian name, was 
possibly the James Augustus Rose, born in Scotland in 
1757, to whose care Stone had his letters addressed. If so, 
he was one of the ushers to the National Assembly and the 
Convention, took the oath against royalty on the 16th 
August 1792, and on the 14th October 1792 offered 50 
francs towards the war, was a prisoner in his own house 
in the spring of 1794, had Robespierre in his charge on 
the 9th Thermidor, and intrepidly carried a summons to 
the rebellious Commune. This Rose, who continued to 
be usher to the Legislature and was perhaps in 1808 a 
deputy mayor of a Paris arrondissement, died in 1841, 
and was buried by pastor Coquerel. He was more 
probably, however, the Rose who, with Prince, Hodges, 
and Millin, obtained on 13th May 1793 an order from 

1 F. 7, 2478. 2 Registre Labat, Prefecture de Police, 

3 Proces- Verbaux de la Convention. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 351 

■the General Security Committee for passports. 1 A James 
Rose was scheduled in the Irish Banishment Act of 
1798. 

Stephen Sayre, probably the senior member of the 
deputation, was born in Long Island in 1734. In 1766, 
when living at Philadelphia, he wrote a letter on colonial 
grievances to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for 
American affairs, Cowper's model peer, "who wears a 
coronet and prays." In 1772, when he had become a 
banker in Oxford Street, London, he wrote again, advo- 
cating a board of trade to be elected by the American 
colonies. 2 In 1773 he was sheriff of London and Middlesex, 
but he was an unsuccessful candidate for an alderman's 
gown. In 1775 he was arrested on the information of 
Francis Richardson, a young Pennsylvanian and ex- 
Quaker, who alleged that he had talked of kidnapping the 
King at the opening of Parliament and of overturning the 
government. Sayre had probably said this as a joke. 
When interrogated by the magistrate he is reported to 
have answered, by way of ridiculing the charge, " I can 
understand how a banker might be of use to a king, but 
not a king to a banker." He was for five days in the 
Tower, but was then released on bail. The prosecution 
collapsing, Sayre sued Lord Rochford, Secretary of State, 
for false imprisonment. He obtained a verdict for .£1000 
damages, subject to points of law, eventually decided 
against him. Meanwhile he had become bankrupt in 1776, 
and had married the daughter of the Hon. William Noel. 3 
In 1777 he went to Berlin as an American envoy with 
Arthur Lee, taking the place at the last moment of 
Carmichael. Hugh Elliot, the English ambassador, with 
an audacity for which he was officially rebuked but 
privately complimented, stole the papers of Lee and Sayre, 
and after taking copies returned them. 4 Lord Suffolk, 

1 a.f. ii.* 288. 

2 "Dartmouth Papers" (Historical MSS. Commission). 

3 Annual Register, 1775-77. 

* " Transactions of Royal Historical Society," 1889. 



352 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in a despatch an- 
nouncing Sayre's departure for Berlin, described him as 

A man of desperate intentions, with the disposition rather than 
the talents to be mischievous. His personal vanity is at the same 
time so great that he talks of going afterwards to Petersburg, in 
order to try the effect of his address and figure at that court. 1 

He went thither, indeed, in 1781, as also to Copenhagen 
and Stockholm, and he was for a time secretary to Franklin. 
He had settled in Paris by 1790, for in January 1791 Lady 
Sutherland, writing to Lady Stafford respecting Talleyrand's 
mission to London, says : — 

We have just heard that the person proposed to accompany 
the Eveque d'Autun is Mr. Sayer {sic), formerly alderman of 
London, and who was sent from thence, I believe, for being 
concerned in a plot against our King. 2 

Say re became a partner with Jacob Pereyra, a Bayonne 
Jew, and Laborde in a tobacco factory ; but in May 1792 
he started in business on his own account, as witness this 
advertisement : — 

Tobacco of the first quality, American manufacture. M. Sayre,, 
formerly in partnership with Pereyra and Laborde at the Bonnet de 
la Liberte, rue St. Denis, informs the public and tobacco retailers 
that he has established a factory and opened a depot at No. 7 
passage des Petits-Peres, near the place des Victoires. . . . N.B. — 
A small quantity of this tobacco of the first quality can render 
saleable {passable) inferior, adulterated, or insipid {event!:) tobacco. 3 

Gorani, one of the foreigners receiving French citizen- 
ship in 1792, dedicated to Sayre a revolutionary pamphlet. 
By 1795 he had returned to America, was an active op- 
ponent of Washington, and died in Virginia in 1808. Thus 
by turns an American and an English citizen, Sayre is 
unaccountably described in Appleton's "American Bio- 
graphy " as a " patriot." This curious qualification he shares,, 

1 Royal Historical Society, 1889. 

2 Pall Mall Magazine, December 1896. 
* journal de Paris, 25th May 1792. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 353 

with several other personages. Had he earned it by teach- 
ing tobacconists the tricks of the trade ? His ex-partner 
Pereyra was guillotined, along with Cloots, in 1794. The 
informer Richardson received an ensigncy in the English 
army, and rose to a lieutenant-colonelcy. 

Henry and John Sheares figure so tragically in the 
United Irishmen's movement 1 that it is sufficient to speak 
of their visit to France. Redhead Yorke accompanied 
them to Versailles, when even John, though of extreme 
opinions — his quiet brother, though nine years his senior, 
being entirely under his influence — was so delighted with 
the Petit Trianon that he fell on his knees and vowed 
to stab every Frenchman he met if a hair of Marie 
Antoinette's head were touched. 2 The legend that John 
Sheares was enamoured of Theroigne de Mericourt was 
contradicted in 185 1 by Arthur O'Connor, who stated that 
Sheares had no acquaintance with that heroine. It was 
John Sheares, according to Yorke, who suggested the 
address to the Convention, and he was certainly the 
Sheares who, crossing over to England in the same 
packet with young Daniel O'Connell, the future Liberator, 
then a staunch Tory, exultantly exhibited a handkerchief 
dipped in Louis XVI.'s blood. The departure of the 
brothers Sheares from Paris had been notified to the 
English government by Somers, who described them as 
"men of desperate designs, capable of setting fire to 
the dockyards." 3 

John Skill was a London tradesman who on the 20th 
April 1793 applied to the Convention for a passport for 
England. In 1796 he published a pamphlet in favour of 
peace, and in the same year he married a Miss Bresley, 
of Norwich. We next come to Sir Robert Smyth, whose 
name was so often spelt Smith 4 as to show the identity 
of pronunciation of the two forms. He was a baronet of 

1 Madden's " United Irishmen " ; " Fitzpatrick's " Secret Service under Pitt." 

2 Yorke's letter to Wickham, 3rd August 1798, in " Castlereagh Memoirs," 
i. 258. 

1 Browning's " Despatches of Earl Gower." 
4 By Reynolds and Paine among others. 

Z 



354 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Berechurch Hall, Essex. He was born in 1744, and was 
probably the Robert Smyth who entered Trinity College, 
Cambridge, in 1766. In 1770 he married the daughter of 
a Mr. Blake of Hanover Square, and the engraving of a 
picture by Reynolds of 1777 shows Lady Smyth with 
her three little children, a picturesque group. In 1780 
Smyth became M.P. for Colchester, and he retained the 
seat till 1790. He had settled in Paris in 1791, and in 
the autumn of 1792 he assisted Lord Wycombe in pro- 
curing the escape from Paris of Madame de Flahault, with 
the manuscript of her tale Adele de Solanges under 
her arm. She had had apartments at the Louvre, where 
in 1791 Lord Holland and Windham met Talleyrand at her 
supper parties. 1 Lord Wycombe, son of Lord Lansdowne, 
had been smitten by her charms, and she is said to have 
aimed at marrying him. On the 10th October 1793 Smyth 
(on this occasion he spelt his name Smith, a form always 
used by his friend Paine) drew up and presented a petition 
to the Convention, signed also by James Hartley, Edward 
Slater, and Thomas Marshall, which said : — 

Grieved at the severity of the decree which has just been 
rendered against the English without exception, we come to claim 
justice from the National Convention in favour of the patriots 
of that nation who on the 23rd of last month addressed to you 
their just complaints, a copy of which is subjoined, as also the reply 
of your President. We come to entreat you severely to punish those 
of us who by their anti-civic principles have in any way attempted 
the destruction of the French constitution. If there are any stained 
with that crime let them perish. As for us, who firm in our prin- 
ciples have sworn to live free or die, we shall keep our oath, and we 
shall be French republicans. Deign to protect us as such by 
suspending the execution of your decree until the Public Safety 
Committee has reported on our petition which you have referred 
to it. 2 

Nevertheless on the 18th November 1793 "Smithe" {sic) 
was arrested by the Place Vendome section in Paris, and 
sent to the Champs Elysees section with a request to have 

1 Lord Holland's " Memoirs of the Whig Party." 2 C. 275. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 355 

the law for the detention of British subjects enforced 
against him. The latter section applied for information 
to Rochefort, a village near Dourdan (Seine-et-Oise) where 
Smyth apparently had a country-house. On 23rd Novem- 
ber he produced letters showing that the General Security 
Committee had ordered his liberation at Dourdan, where 
he had, it seems, been previously arrested. The Champs 
Elys6es section thereupon directed that his papers should 
be examined, and nothing suspicious being found in them 
he was next day released. 1 Hdrault de S6chelles, indeed, 
had an idea of sending him to Toulon in the autumn of 
1793, to negotiate with Admiral Hood. Smyth, however, 
was eventually imprisoned at the Scotch college for nearly 
twelve months. On the 24th September 1794 he petitioned 
the Convention for release. Paine during his own in- 
carceration corresponded with Lady Smyth, and that in 
a playful vein which we should scarcely have expected 
of him. Sir Robert apparently returned in 1796 to 
England and remained there till the peace of Amiens, 
when he opened a bank in Paris; but on 12th April 1802 
he died in London of a sudden attack of gout. 2 His widow 
stayed in Paris, where in April 1803 her daughter married 
Lambton Este, son of the Rev. Charles Este. Este had 
been erroneously supposed by Lord Malmesbury in 1796 to 
be courting the mother instead of the daughter. Lady 
Smyth died at Versailles on 4th February 1823. Her son 
George Henry 3 had succeeded to the baronetcy, which 
became extinct with him. 

John Hurford Stone, the president at the meeting, born 
at Tiverton in 1763, was a London coal merchant, and a 
member of Dr. Price's congregation. He was well ac- 
quainted with continental languages and literatures, and 
his dinner parties included such men as Fox, Sheridan, 
the poet Rogers, and Talleyrand, sometimes also Madame 
de Genlis and her adopted daughter, Pamela. The latter, 

1 F. 7, 2473-74. 2 Moniteur, 6th Floreal, an x. 

3 She was allowed a passport in September 1793 in order to fetch him over 
from England. (A.F. ii.* 286.) 



356 PARIS IN 1789-94 

indeed, as we have seen, was introduced by Stone to 
her future husband, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Stone, 
according to a family tradition, witnessed the capture 
of the Bastille, but he did not figure on Cloots's deputation 
of June 1790. He was chairman at a dinner given by 
the London Corresponding Society in 1790 to two Nantes 
delegates, Francois and Bougon, who describe him as " a 
young man well acquainted with the languages and litera- 
ture of all European nations, and himself a literary man." 
He was in Paris in September 1792, 1 and had perhaps 
remained there till November. He was apparently con- 
sulted by the Girondins on the selection of Englishmen 
for French citizenship, for Mackintosh told Thomas Moore 
in 1824 that Stone procured him that honour. He re- 
turned to England in February 1793, along with forty 
fellow-countrymen unprovided with the passports required 
by the Traitorous Correspondence Act, and some of them 
had to stay three days on board off Dover before they were 
allowed to land. In May Stone was again in Paris, giving 
evidence in favour of General Miranda. He and his wife, 
Rachel Coope, were arrested on the 13th October 1793, 
but they had not been living together, for he was carrying 
on, with a partner named Beresford, a printing-office in 
the rue Vaugirard, while she was staying, apparently as 
companion, with Mrs. Joel Barlow and Mrs. Blackden 
in the rue Jacob. He was released on the 30th October, 
but she remained in prison, and on the 19th December 
he petitioned the Convention for her release. 2 That body 
admitted her claim to liberty, as the wife of an artisan. 
In April 1794, probably on account of Arthur's denuncia- 
tion, both were again arrested, but were liberated next day. 
In June Stone obtained a divorce, and left for Switzerland 
in company with Helen Maria Williams. Henceforth these 
two seem to have regarded themselves as husband and 
wife. The plea on which they obtained passports for 
this quasi-honeymoon trip was that a proof of Stone's 

1 See letter from Bland Burges to Lord Auckland, " Dropmore MSS.," ii. 309. 

2 C. 286. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 357 

residence in Switzerland might serve to exculpate his 
brother William Stone and the Rev. William Jackson. 1 

England was henceforth closed to Stone by an in- 
dictment for high treason, though his brother William, 
a co-defendant, was ultimately acquitted. Returning to 
France, Stone and Helen Williams lived tegether, and 
the connection was recognised by the lady's friends, for 
even the Quaker abolitionist Clarkson, after visiting her 
in Paris in 1818, in writing to her gave "compliments to 
Mr. Stone." Stone, ultimately ruined by undertaking to 
print a costly edition of Humboldt's "Travels," gave up 
business in 1813. He died in 1818, having been naturalised 
simultaneously with Helen Williams, who erected a tomb- 
stone to him in Pere Lachaise as "the last tribute of a 
long friendship," and she was laid to rest close by him 
in 1827. 

Tickell can scarcely have been the Rev. John Tickell 
(1727-1802) who held various English benefices, but may 
have been of the same family. He may have been the 

1 F. 7, 3822. Stone thus probably escaped a third arrest, for on the 14th July 
1794 Montane, president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who had previously sent 
a denunciation of him to Robespierre and to the Public Safety Committee, but 
had received no answer, wrote to Fouquier Tinville : " There lives in the rue 
Jacob, faubourg St. Germain, a rich Englishman named Stone, who came at the 
beginning of the Revolution. He has not been arrested [Montane is mistaken 
here] because he passes himself off as a printer. I have heard that he represents 
himself as merely a journeyman. The printing-office, it is said, is in the name of 
a Scotch or Irish priest. I am told that he is afraid of being arrested, and that of 
the ten days of a decade he scarcely spends one in Paris, but passes the rest at a 
country-house which he has hired at St. Germain or Marly. I am also told that 
he was intimate with the conspirator Julien of Toulouse [a Protestant ex-pastor, 
member of the Convention, who had concealed himself to avoid arrest]. ■ Lastly 
I have heard that he was intimate with another Englishman named Christie, who 
was very intimate with Chaumette, and that the latter sent him off to London two 
hours before the decree against foreigners was passed. This intimacy with Julien, 
Christie, and Chaumette has given me the idea that Stone might be an agent of 
the infamous Pitt. This can be ascertained." (W. 47, 3148.) Stone's partner 
was Beresford. Was he the Rev. Benjamin Beresford, rector of Bedford, who had 
figured in the famous Hamilton-Beresford marriage case ? After the Terror, Stone 
addressed confidential letters on English politics to the Public Safety Committee, 
for in November 1794 he promised it a copy of a letter from Lauderdale, Stanhope, 
Coxe and other M.P.s, written to a friend and advocating peace. (A.F. ii. 29.) 
He advised the committee to show friendliness to the English people as dis- 
tinguished from their government. 



358 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Tickell who married Lady Cassilon Stanhope, Pitt's grand- 
niece, and was in 1800 appointed by Pitt Usher of the 
Exchequer. Tweddell was doubtless son of Francis Twed- 
dell, a Northumbrian squire, brother of the archaeologist 
who made researches at Athens, and whose love-letters to 
Isabel Gunning were published in 1901. Walker was not, 
as at first sight might be supposed, the merchant at Man- 
chester who had delivered reform speeches there and at 
Sheffield in the autumn of 1792, and who on the 5th April 
1794 was tried at Lancaster for conspiracy and sedition, 
but was acquitted, for that Walker's Christian name was 
Thomas. He may have been the Walker, porcelain manu- 
facturer in Paris, whose son John Walker, a vendor of 
elastic braces at Paris in 1800, took out in England a patent 
for elastic gloves in 1807. Wardell, a tradesman, was im- 
prisoned from October 1793 to November 1794. Of Watts 
nothing is known, except that he was a member of the 
Constitutional Information Society. He may have been 
William Watts, the engraver, or the Captain Watts who in 
1799 was charged with treasonable communications with 
France. Webb was probably the Webb of King Street, 
London, who later on gave Teeling, the United Irishman, a 
letter of introduction to Paine, 1 and the Joseph Webb to 
whom in 1799 was attributed the English translation of 
Holbach's sceptical Histoire critique de Jesus Christ. There 
was, however, a youth named Webb, having a French 
priest as a tutor, who in September 1792 obtained the re- 
moval of seals placed on his property as though he had 
been an emigre*. 

We have come to the end of the members of the deputa- 
tion, but among those present at the first meeting — for we 
know that they attended the second — were in all probability 
Johnson, who, we have seen, was a fellow-lodger of Choppin, 
and his friend Henry Redhead Yorke. They had travelled 
together from Derby, where Johnson, Yorke assures us, 
was "universally respected as a man of honour." We learn 
nothing more of him after his departure from Paris with 

1 " Castlereagh Memoirs." 






THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 359 

Choppin. Yorke, who accompanied him from Derby to 
Paris, was twenty years of age and in independent circum- 
stances, is described as a Creole, and was probably born 
in the West Indies, but had been living at Little Eaton, 
near Derby. In this same year 1792 he had published 
a letter addressed to Bache Heathcote, a Derbyshire 
squire, against the abolition of the slave trade, but he 
speedily changed sides on this and probably on other ques- 
tions. " Madly in love," as he says, " with ideal liberty," he 
ardently sympathised with the French revolution, and he 
made the acquaintance of Paine, Frost, and, as we have 
seen, of the brothers Sheares. Nevertheless, both he and 
Johnson deprecated a French invasion of England, and 
when they consequently seceded from the club Oswald, in 
a rage, told Yorke he was not fit to live in a civilised society. 
Yorke had taken his pro-slavery pamphlet with him to 
Paris in order to write a refutation of it. On quitting Paris, 
with the intention of winding up his affairs in England and 
settling in France with his " family " — by which term he 
may have meant a mother and brother, for he was un- 
married — he left this pamphlet in the hands of "R.," "well 
known in the political world " — evidently Rayment. Yorke, 
who either returned to England via Holland, or subsequently 
visited the latter country, was there told by one John 
Morgan, who had recently left Paris, 1 that Rayment went 
to the General Security Committee and denounced him 
as an English spy, whose real name was Redhead. Yorke, 
indeed, had but recently assumed the name by which he 
was henceforth known. Rayment produced the pamphlet 
in corroboration of his assertions, and the pamphlet bore 
the name of Redhead. The committee thereupon issued a 
warrant for his arrest, seized his effects, and interrogated 
several Englishmen as to his whereabouts. This is Mor- 
gan's story, which Yorke credited, but I have found no 
trace of the alleged warrant, nor is it easy to understand why 
Rayment should denounce Yorke when quite out of reach. 

1 Probably the Morgan who, son of an Irish M.P., offered while in Paris, 
according to Somers, to assassinate George III. 



360 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Yorke in 1793 was appointed one of the two delegates of 
the London Corresponding Society to the Edinburgh Con- 
vention, but did not attend it. He published a letter of 
sympathy to Frost, then a prisoner in Newgate. He advo- 
cated parliamentary reform at Derby and Sheffield, and on 
7th April 1794 he addressed an outdoor meeting in the 
latter town. He was alleged to have boasted in this speech 
that though only twenty-two he had assisted in the Ameri- 
can, Dutch, and French revolutions, and would continue to 
create revolutions all over the world. He manifestly could 
not have figured in the American revolution, for the War of 
Independence terminated when he was but fourteen years 
of age ; but he must have spoken of Holland and France. 
He was prosecuted for sedition and conspiracy, made an 
injudicious speech in defence, and was sentenced to two 
years' imprisonment. In default of finding sureties for 
seven years' good behaviour, his imprisonment seems to 
have lasted nearly four years ; but he had not lacked con- 
solation, for he fell in love with the keeper's daughter, Miss 
Andrews, whom he married in 1800. 1 By the time of his 
release, moreover, his opinions had changed. He became 
the vindicator of the war with France, and on revisiting 
Paris in 1802 to write letters for the True Briton he found 
Paine equally disillusioned with the Revolution. While 
engaged in editing and continuing Campbell's "British 
Admirals," he died in 1823. 

General Thomas Ward, who served under Dumouriez, 
also sometimes lodged when in Paris at White's, and prob- 
ably joined the club. He related to Paine that Marat had 
said to him, "There are about three hundred brigands in 
the Convention ; their heads shall fly off." Paine repeated 
the saying to the committee of twelve in 1793. 2 Ward, a 
native of Dublin, born in 1746, was among the victims of 
the alleged Carmelite prison plot in 1794. The indictment 
charged them with having procured ropes in order to 
escape from prison and massacre the Convention. 3 

1 Gentleman! s Magazine, May 1 800. 

a Schmidt, Tableaux de la Revolution, i. 252. s W. 429. 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 361 

Thomas Christie, the pupil and friend of Dr. Price, of 
whom we shall hear again, was dining in London, as 
Rogers tells us, with William Vaughan on the 29th 
November 1792, but he may have been at the Paris dinner 
on the 18th, for he was in Paris from November or 
December 1792 to August 1793, endeavouring to obtain 
payment for corn supplied by Turnbull, Forbes, & Co., 
London merchants, to the Paris municipality in 1789. A 
London paper mentions as present Major or Captain De 
Starck, who had known Paine in London in 1791. 

Sampson Perry, militia surgeon and journalist, who, to 
avoid a press prosecution, fled to Paris in December 1792, 
must also have belonged to the club. Paine, invited to the 
Hotel de Ville to dine; with Petion, Dumouriez, Santerre, 
Condorcet, Brissot, Danton, Vergniaud, Sieyes, and others, 
took Perry with him. Perry also made acquaintance, at 
the receptions of Madame Lavit, with Cloots, Couthon, 
HeYault, David, and Laignelot, a Paris deputy. This last 
ultimately procured his release. Perry, at the instance of 
HeYault, sent a female relative and her friend to England, 
with letters to Sheridan and other Opposition leaders, in the 
view of initiating an agitation for peace. He expected to 
be cited as a witness by Herault to testify to this, but the 
defence witnesses were not called. At first exempted from 
arrest, Cloots, David, and four others being sureties for him, 
he was eventually imprisoned, and at the Scotch college on 
the 9th Thermidor witnessed the arrival of St. Just, who 
" ate the remains of a sorry dinner and drank a cup of poor 
sour wine." Perry, on his release in 1795, went by Havre 
and Dover to London, where a treacherous woman gained 
the reward of ^100 by informing the authorities of his 
arrival. He disputed the validity of the outlawry, but 
unsuccessfully. He was then imprisoned in Newgate till 
1798, revived his newspaper, the Argus, had litigation with 
Lewis Goldsmith, and died in 1823. His son James in 1800 
entered the French army and attained the rank of major. 

Thomas Muir, the Scotch advocate afterwards trans- 
ported to Botany Bay, whence he escaped and settled at 



362 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Chantilly, arrived in Paris on the 20th January 1793, and no 
doubt joined the club. Henry Stevens, author of a 
pamphlet entitled Les Crimes des Rois d 'Angleterre, was 
likewise probably a member. He was imprisoned in Paris 
from the autumn of 1793 till January 1795, and called on 
Lord Malmesbury in 1796. We may in all likelihood also 
reckon Denis de Vitre, French Canadian on the father's 
side, English on the mother's, for when arrested at the 
Jacobin club on the 16th December 1793 as a suspected 
spy, he was lodging at the Hotel Philadelphie. He had 
taken part in the Federation festival at Orleans in 1790, 
and in 1792 had presented to the Convention his cross of 
St. Louis. 

We have seen how the British club, after lasting only 
a few weeks, was broken up by dissensions, one party 
loving their native land and regarding it as a model for 
France, the other viewing the French revolution as a kind of 
new religion, to be imitated by, and if necessary enforced 
upon, England. We have seen also what vicissitudes befell 
its members. Six had violent deaths. Jackson took poison 
to avoid the gallows ; Fitzgerald was killed in resisting 
arrest ; the two Shearses were executed ; Oswald fell in 
battle, probably through treachery ; Newton perished on 
the scaffold. A seventh, Ward, may perhaps be added. 
Thirteen suffered imprisonment in Paris — Colclough, 
MacDermott, MacSheehy, Madgett, Masquerier, Mowatt, 
Murray, Paine, Potier, Quaterman, Rayment, Smyth, 
Stone, and Wardell, not to speak of Perry, who had ex- 
perience both of French and English prisons, while two 
others, Frost and Yorke, underwent incarceration in 
England. And Thomas Muir may probably be added, 
for he was in Paris in April 1793. If we had the full 
roll of members, we should probably find additional 
victims, if not of the guillotine, of the dungeon. The 
Reign of Terror, even to those who escaped its rigours, 
must have been a cruel disillusion, and those who lived 
to witness the despotism of Napoleon must have bewailed 
their shattered hopes. " Do you call this a republic ? " 



THE BRITISH COLONY IN PARIS 363 

exclaimed Paine to Yorke when they met again in Paris 
in 1802 ; " why, they are worse off than the slaves of 
Constantinople." The Revolution must not, it is true, be 
looked at from this point of view exclusively, but it 
certainly ranks as the most colossal disappointment — 
deception as the French would say — in human annals. 



CHAPTER IX 

PRISON DOCUMENTS 

Fouquier Tinville — The Revolutionary Tribunal — Letters, cringing and 
defiant — Desmoulins — Lavoisier — Princess of Monaco — Corneille's 
granddaughter — Sir W. Codrington — Notes of Trials — Execution 
escorts — Charlotte Corday — Intercepted Letters from and to 
prisoners 

Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, formerly 
public prosecutor at the Chatelet tribunal, but obliged by 
misconduct to sell his post, was heavily in debt when 
the Revolution broke out, and was just the man to fish 
in troubled waters. He became prominent at the clubs, 
took part in the attack on the Tuileries in August 1792, 
and in March 1793, at the age of 46, was elected public 
accuser or prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal. 
His salary was 8000 francs, and he had three clerks and 
four messengers under him. He himself was under the 
orders of the Public Safety and General Security com- 
mittees, but an enormous power rested in his hands, and 
we shall see how tyrannously and heartlessly he exercised 
it. Installed at the Palace of Justice, he had virtually the 
power of life and death over thousands of prisoners in 
Paris, for he could send them for trial by the tribunal, 
and though there was a certain, but steadily decreasing, 
percentage of acquittals, trial was almost synonymous 
with condemnation. Not only, moreover, could he order 
their trial, but he had the supervision over the Conciergerie, 
in which they were mostly lodged when about to be tried, 
as well as over Duplessis college (re-named Egalitd), the 
Archbishop's palace (re-named Hospice de l'Humanite), 
and St. Pelagie, which eventually were annexes to the 

Conciergerie, for the latter had become so crowded that 

364 



ENTRANCE TO CONCIERGERIE 



y 




PRISON DOCUMENTS 365 

an outbreak of pestilence was apprehended. Did humanity 
or fear of infection induce him to apply for these annexes? 
All we know is that on the 18th December 1793 he 
received a letter from the doctor of the Conciergerie, 
who stated that that prison, which should hold only 400 
inmates, contained 600, that on entering one of the wards 
with a candle the foul air extinguished the flame, that 
many inmates were ill, and that there was danger of an 
epidemic. 1 The sickly prisoners were accordingly removed 
to the Archbishop's palace, and others to Duplessis and 
St. P&agie, so that on 26th May 1794 the Conciergerie 
had only 362 inmates. There was a dispute in February 
1794 as to the jurisdiction over it between Fouquier and 
the municipality, and he appealed to the Legislative 
Committee of the Convention, which, however, referred 
him to the General Security Committee. 2 The latter must 
have decided in his favour, for we do not hear of any 
further impeachment of his authority. The maintenance 
of order in the Palace of Justice also rested with him, 
for a complaint was addressed to him of women pre- 
tending to take charge of walking-sticks and then walking 
off with them. Women, moreover, applied to him for 
appointment as depositaries of such articles. These facts 
show us that the trials were attended by persons of a 
certain social status. Fouquier was also the recipient of 
complaints of disorderly practices. Thus the civil com- 
mittee of Pont Neuf (Henri IV.) section complained to 
him on the 20th January 1794 that the Palace of Justice 
was the resort of prostitutes, that nurses took squalling 
infants thither, that refreshments were sold not merely 
at the stalls of the outer hall, but in the court itself, and 
that the barking of dogs was another disturbing element. 3 
Still greater disorders were denounced in a letter of the 
6th July 1794, addressed by Labuissiere, a municipal 
officer, to the mayor, but sent on to Fouquier. The sale 

1 The unhealthy condition of the prison is described by Sir Wm. Codrington. 
See my " Englishmen in the French Revolution," pp. 294-5. 

2 W. 149. 3 W. 135. 



366 PARIS IN 1789-94 

of eatables in the outer hall, said Labuissiere, made it like 
a market, and the noise was such as frequently to disturb 
the trials. Indecencies of all sorts were practised. Not 
merely idlers, but adventurers, thieves, and prostitutes 
spent the day there, some even the night also. 1 On the 
19th August 1794 the General Security Committee directed 
the closing of a drinking bar, on the ground that it 
attracted a crowd, and thus disturbed the proper decency 
and quiet of a court of justice. 2 

Exercising such functions, it may be conceived that 
Fouquier was the recipient of a multitude of communica- 
tions, and had to draw up a multitude of notes. Besides, 
too, the mass of documents legitimately in his custody, he 
detained, as we shall presently see, a large number of 
letters addressed by or to prisoners and their families. 
Every scrap of paper which thus came into his hands he 
preserved, except, indeed, letters which would have proved 
his own notorious venality. Even invitations to dinner 
were added to the heap. Documents sent him by the 
Convention committees, jailers' reports of admissions or 
deaths — three deaths took place on the 22nd July 1794 
at the Archbishop's palace — indictments prepared but not 
yet used, letters from the provinces, some announcing 
convoys of prisoners, elaborate justifications by prisoners, 
some evidently intended for delivery before the Revolution- 
ary Tribunal, memoranda of all kinds, were preserved. 
These papers now fill nearly two hundred cardboard boxes 
at the National Archives, Paris. 3 About half of them are 
classified, the cases being thus ready for trial, and Fouquier 
plainly intended to classify the remainder, for many 
letters relating to prisoners are endorsed by him, " Joindre 
Laurent," or whatever the man's name might be, but a 
much larger number lack even this foretaste of arrange- 
ment. He had thus cut out much work for the tribunal, 
and prisoners continued to arrive from the country up 
to Thermidor. The present custodians of these documents 

1 w. 194. 2 w. 180. 

3 A small proportion of them are posterior to Fouquier's dismissal. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 367 

have been content with stamping each, as a precaution 
against abstraction. M. Terrasse, one of the curators, 
had about eighty years ago an intention of publishing a 
selection from this chaos, or of incorporating the most 
interesting papers in a work on the Revolution, but on 
his death, in 1824, the only result of his labours had been 
a collection of transcripts filling two boxes. 1 With this 
exception nobody seems to have gone through the 
papers, though one box here and there has been examined 
at random. Dauban, for instance, hit upon the collection 
of reports of the so-called " observers of public opinion " 
for the month of Ventose, year 2 (W. 112), but not upon 
those for Nivose (W. 19). Yet, neglected as these docu- 
ments have been, there is nothing to equal them for giving 
a vivid idea of the Terror. 

Let us first glance at the letters addressed to Fouquier. 
Prisoners or their families often appealed to him for 
release, instead of to the Convention or its committees, 
and many of these appeals are pitiably cringing. Freville, 
a schoolmaster, author of the curious biography of his 
little son, brought up and dying in Jacobin principles, 2 
sends a collection of extracts from his works, in proof of 
his civism. Valant, the ex-priest already mentioned, 3 eight 
months a prisoner, sends with like object a copy of the 
newspaper account of his marriage in May 1793, when 
Bishop Lindet officiated and three married priests were 
present. He boasted also of having" in October 1789 
helped to fetch the " crowned monster " (Louis XVI.) 
from Versailles. 4 The four children of Lemoine implore 

1 U. 1019, 1021. 2 See p. 249. 3 See p. 3. 

4 His wife, after twice waiting on the Convention, which referred her to the 
General Security committee, published on the 27th January 1794 an appeal to 
the sections, in which she urged that Marat had vouched for her husband's 
patriotism. Being on the eve of her confinement she added, with a sensibility 
characteristic of the time : " Our little republican seems to cry to you from my 
womb, ' Patriots ! listen to the voice of my mother, or rather that of justice and 
humanity. My birth will be a blessing conferred by the representatives of the 
people and by you on the authors of my existence and on me. It will also be 
the happy presage of my entire devotion to the one and indivisible republic. ' " 



368 PARIS IN 1789-94 

their father's release, and they affix their ages, 12, 11, 
7, and 5, to their signatures. Illiterate women, wives of 
working men, plead also for their husbands' liberation. 
A widow writes: "Just and equitable man, listen to 
the feeble voice of a poor widow, who appeals to you 
in the name of humanity." As next best to release, a 
speedy trial is frequently solicited. Thus Jonas, probably 
the man executed whose widow was afterwards succoured 
by the Convention, begging for an early trial, says : 
" Citizen, you are the guardian angel of mankind. Your 
virtuous qualities have long been known and extolled. I 
appeal to you, citizen, with perfect confidence." There is 
no reason to suspect irony here ; it is simply flattery. 
"An honest man like you," says another suppliant, 
" cannot take offence at my solicitations." " I had heard 
of your reputation," says a third, "as a man of feeling, 
humane, and the protector of oppressed mankind." Wives 
and children often plead that they are reduced to poverty 
by the imprisonment of husbands and fathers. Mercier, 
the well-known writer, sends on the 1st June 1794 a 
republican hymn for publication, and, though a prisoner, 
would join at heart with patriots in chanting it. He signs 
himself " author in the last five years of thirty patriotic 
works." He denounced Fouquier after his death as a 
monster ; he had toadied him when living and powerful. 
Many prisoners ask for permission to see their families, 
and families solicit a like favour. A woman begs to be 
allowed to go home under escort to fetch a change of 
linen, she and her husband having been arrested without 
the opportunity of bringing any article of clothing with 
them. Again, prisoners, or their counsel for them, ask 
for facilities for preparing their defence. On the 17th 
January 1794 Beranger (perhaps the poet's father) and 
twenty-two other prisoners petitioned for removal to a 
hospital, which favour had been granted to others. Adam 
Lux, the admirer of Charlotte Corday, writes from La 
Force on the 20th September 1793 : " Citizen, I am not 
unaware that you are loaded with business, but having 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 369 

been two months in prison, I have the honour to remind 
you of me, and beg you to decide whether there is ground 
for prosecution against me and to hasten my trial." This 
letter scarcely bears out the general belief that Lux actually 
courted, and so to speak thrust himself on, the guillotine. 
He had still six weeks to wait till busy Fouquier could 
attend to him. 

There is occasionally a letter in a different key. The 
abbe" Charles de Broglie — noblesse oblige — on the 8th July 
1793 expresses surprise at the delay of his trial. He had 
expected to be guillotined on the 22nd June, and he 
repudiates the efforts of his brother Victor to save him. 
But the abb<£, who was twenty-eight years of age, survived 
the Terror, 1 whereas Victor, the soldier, was, as we shall see, 
guillotined. All the rest of the family either emigrated or 
were spared. Montjourdain, making no complaint of the 
sentence of death, asks Fouquier to forward to his wife 
a document essential to her pecuniary interests. This 
commission he would seem to have performed, as also to 
have transmitted an unsealed letter to a starving wife by 
one Bernot. 

Camille Desmoulins' father makes a touching appeal to 
Fouquier as an old fellow-townsman at Guise. " Confined 
to my study by infirmity, I was the last here, on account of 
the care taken to conceal it from me, to learn this event, 
calculated to alarm the sincerest patriot," viz. his son's 
arrest. He vouches for Camille having been a republican 
even before the 14th July 1789, speaks of his unmasking 
Brissot and Hebert, urges the absurdity of supposing him 
to have changed his opinions, and presses Fouquier to 
examine the affair. He signs himself "Thy compatriot and 
fellow-citizen Desmoulins, hitherto proud of being the 
father of Camille, as of the first and most unshakable re- 
publican." 2 

There is probably the last letter ever written by Lavoisier, 

1 We hear of him in 1810, through intercepted royalist letters, as head of a. 
Jesuit school in England and as deep in debt (A.F., iv. 1508). 

2 W. 193. The poor old man, heartbroken, died shortly after his son. 

2 A 



370 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the eminent chemist, and as such it deserves to be quoted. 
Addressed to Fouquier on the 13th Flor^al, it says:— 

Citizen, when I went up at noon to the Chamber Council to 
undergo my interrogatory, a bundle of papers necessary for my 
individual defence was taken from me. I have only a few moments 
to re-peruse them and prepare myself for what I shall have to explain 
to-morrow at the tribunal. Be good enough, therefore, citizen, to 
give orders for it to be restored to me. 1 

Princess Joseph of Monaco, twenty-five years of age, 
of whom I have already spoken, wrote three letters to 
Fouquier. In the first she said : " I should be obliged to 
citizen Fouquier de Tinville if he would be good enough 
to grant me a moment's audience. I entreat him not to 
refuse my request." In the second she wrote : — 

I inform you, citizen, that I am not pregnant. I wished to 
tell you so [by word of mouth], but not hoping that you will come I 
write you word. I did not sully my mouth with this falsehood from 
fear of death nor to avoid it, but to get a day's grace in order not to 
have my hair cut off by the executioner. 2 It is the only legacy 
which I can leave my children, and this at least should be pure. 

Choiseul Stainville, Josephe Grimaldi Monaco, 
a foreign princess dying by the injustice of French judges. 

To Citizen Fouquier de Tinville, 
tres pressee. 

In the third letter she begged Fouquier to send to her 
children a little packet containing her hair and some fare- 
well words. He either did this or destroyed it, for the 
packet is not among his papers. Let us give him the 
benefit of the doubt. In spite of the withdrawal of the 
plea of pregnancy she was examined by the doctor and 
midwife, and then executed. Her last words at the 
foot of the scaffold to her maid-servant, about to share 
her fate, were — "Courage, my friend, crime alone can 
show fear." 

1 W. 102 1. 

2 She cut it off herself with a bit of glass, for knives or scissors were not 
allowed. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 371 

As a rule prisoners beseech not release but a speedy 
trial, yet even acquittal did not always ensure liberation, 
for there are several complaints of continued detention. 
Many prisoners, particularly provincials, complain that 
they had been the victims of private spite. One states that 
while in prison at Poitiers his fellow-captives made him 
drunk, and then entrapped him into writing a letter to the 
Convention in which he bade it go to the devil, whereupon 
he was despatched to Paris. Many prisoners protested 
entire ignorance of the grounds of their arrest. Several 
sent Fouquier billets showing that at the Federation of 
1790 they entertained provincial delegates, Bailly having 
invited the Parisians to volunteer such hospitality. Some 
wrote or even printed long defences, which it may be 
questioned whether Fouquier condescended even to glance 
at. The illiterate signatures to some of these defences 
indicate that fellow-captives kindly drew up the documents, 
and I should here mention that a large proportion of the 
letters of prisoners show that the writers were of humble 
status. The " aristocrats " properly so called were but a 
small minority. 

Madame de Stael, in an unpublished treatise of 1798 
(see Revue des Deux Mondes, November 1, 1899), has a 
forcible passage on this indiscriminate character of the 
arrests. She says : — 

When formerly whoever disbelieved in a particular explanation 
of Grace or the Trinity was declared a criminal, many men unin- 
terested in these futile questions could live at peace in their family 
and their domestic relations. But when you introduce the des- 
potism of faith into political discussions, which affect the interests 
of all, and into opinions which, dependent on circumstances, to-day 
become a crime, whereas only yesterday they were enforced, I know 
no asylum, however obscure, no unknown name, or no dormant 
faculties which can offer shelter from the revolutionary inquisition. 

To demonstrate his ignorance of the alleged Luxem- 
bourg plot, Dallier, twenty years of age, protested that 
during eight months' captivity he had been completing his 



372 PARIS IN 1789-94 

education, mostly keeping to his bedroom. 1 The plea 
seems to have been for once effectual, for his name is not in 
the guillotine list. Another Luxembourg prisoner claimed 
credit for denouncing the plot, and artfully suggested 
release, on the ground that the other inmates were irritated 
and- might ill-use him. 2 A third, Meunier, wrote : " My 
position at the Luxembourg since what has passed there is 
more and more critical. I do my duty. I am treated as 
president of the revolutionary committee of the Luxem- 
bourg, and Julien, my room-mate, as secretary of the com- 
mittee. A separate room in the interior would suit us. 
Our position forces us to be isolated. I claim justice — pure 
and intact." 3 He was perhaps the father of the young 
Meunier, twenty years of age, who, at the trial of the Babeuf 
conspirators, first turned informer, then retracted, and 
when called as a witness struck up a hymn, and was 
arrested for contempt of court. 1 Denis Michel Julien, his 
confederate, was a tradesman, twenty-nine years of age. 
He was liberated after Robespierre's fall, and perhaps 
Meunier also, but was rearrested on the 8th August 1794. 
On being prosecuted in October for his conduct in the pre- 
tended Luxembourg conspiracy, he induced Paine, his 
room-mate from March to July, to testify to his probity and 
humanity. 4 Julien was discharged without trial, but I fear 
that he imposed upon Paine's good-nature. We are in- 
debted to him, however, for the incidental information that 
his room, that is to say Paine's also, was on the basement, 
apart from the bulk of the prisoners, who seem to have been 
on the upper floors. Only three days before Robespierre's 
fall a Luxembourg prisoner sent Fouquier a fresh list of 
nine "conspirators," and only two days before another 
man offered to give information against his fellow-captives. 
In pleasing contrast to these dastards, and to anonymous 
or signed delations, Gaule, at the Conciergerie, asks per- 
mission to give up his bed to a new-comer, an octogenarian 
suffering from stone and lodged in the open court. " In 

1 w. 171. 2 w. 135. 3 w. 190. 

4 Conway's "Writings of Paine," vol. iv. p. xiv. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 373 

order that this may be known only to thee [the jailor who 
handed the letter to Fouquier] and me, send me, as though 
by order, to his place until either he or I leave." Leave ! 
He evidently meant leave for the guillotine, but it is con- 
soling to find no Gaule on the fatal list. 

Among the prisoners who appealed to Fouquier's 
clemency was Adelaide Dupuis Corneille d'Angely, a native 
of Geneva, who had settled in France with her husband in 
1786. The latter, a native of Fulda, had emigrated, but 
she was arrested in the summer of 1793, and wrote from 
prison : — 

A granddaughter of the great Corneille and pupil of Voltaire, 
the tears of a weeping mother, the cries of an infant child deprived 
of all help, will doubtless reach thy heart and find it compassionate. 
Having but little property, and being a foreigner, I have nobody to 
look after my child and my interests. My child, seven years of 
age, is left to himself without help from anybody. Born at Les 
Delices, territory of the republic of Geneva, who can feel more than 
I the value of the liberty which I ask ? I await all from justice and 
thy equity. 1 

She had also written to Robespierre, who sent on the 
letter to Fouquier, in these terms : — 

Deign, Robespierre, to listen and render justice to the grand- 
daughter of the great Corneille and the pupil of Voltaire, 2 who is 
worthy to receive from thee the liberty which she solicits. . . . 
Robespierre, loving justice too much to refuse it, will restore an 
affectionate mother to her son and a good citoyenne to her country. 
The happiness of a family is not indifferent to his heart. 3 

The mention of Voltaire was not calculated to impress 
Robespierre ; Rousseau would have been a more potent 
name. In another letter she says : — 

The blood of the old Horace runs in my veins, and I received 
from infancy the lessons of the immortal author, father (sic) of 
Brutus and Mahomet, who combated fanaticism. 

1 W. 146. 

2 Who in 1764 had edited an edition of Corneille for her benefit, Louis XV., 
the Russian Emperor, and other great personages being liberal subscribers. 

3 W. 148. 



374 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Her young son also wrote from the hospital to Robes- 
pierre; pleading for his mother's liberation. She must 
have been released after Robespierre's fall, but she was 
unable to obtain the erasure of her husband's name from 
the list of emigres, without which he could not return to 
France. 1 On the 6th January 1794, however, the Conven- 
tion, among its literary grants, voted her 3000 francs. 

Several Englishmen wrote to Fouquier, of course in 
French, for it is not likely that he understood English. 
George Grieve or Greive, the Northumbrian who had settled 
at Marly for the purpose of molesting Madame Dubarry, 
sent him a list of twenty-six witnesses to be called against 
her. His own name headed the list, and Zamore, the negro 
page whom she had loaded with kindness, came fifth. 
Fouquier added two more names. 2 Arthur, member of the 
Paris Commune, an upholsterer, born in France but of 
English parentage, sent Fouquier on the 28th October 
1793 a reminder that he had evidence to give against 
Claviere, ex-Finance Minister, who, however, as we have 
seen, forestalled the guillotine by suicide. 3 Sir William 
Codrington, arrested while living at St. Servan, near St. 
Malo, in September 1793, and sent to the Paris Conciergerie, 
wrote on the 13th January 1794: — 

Liberty. Egalite. 

To the Citizen Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal. 

William Codrington, English by extraction, and settled for fifteen 
years in France, is detained at the Conciergerie on a vague denun- 
ciation. He has suffered for three months all the torments of a 
painful illness. His heart is at ease, his innocence reassures him, 
and about sixty years 4 of a life passed without fear and without 
reproach leave him no doubt as to the result of his trial. He offers 
tangible proofs of his attachment to the French Revolution — the 
attestation given him by the General Council of the Commune of 
St. Servan and a letter from the municipality of the same parish. 

1 Moniteur, xxv. 422. 2 W. 164. 3 W. 135. 

4 His real age was 56. In 1819 he was awarded 23,000 francs compensation 
for confiscated property. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 375 

These documents prove that Codrington, during a residence of 
eleven years, so conducted himself as to earn the esteem of his 
fellow-citizens, and this debars any suspicion of the most disgraceful 
of crimes, base treachery. He appends these documents to this 
memorial. His age, his ill-health, and some infirmities demand 
that he should be promptly transferred to a private asylum, or placed 
with some republican whose well-known patriotism allows him to 
answer for Codrington's presence and conduct. He ventures to 
flatter himself that the citizen public prosecutor will kindly put an 
end to his sufferings and grant him his request. 1 

Codrington had apparently applied to some expert calli- 
grapher, perhaps an English fellow-captive, to write this 
memorial on foolscap in a good legible hand, and having 
on the 18th January been acquitted, though still detained 
in common with other Englishmen as hostages for Toulon, 
he was removed on the 29th to Mahay's private asylum or 
boarding-house. His appeal to Fouquier had been backed 
by a Madame Vilde, who had visited him in prison, and 
who, in an undated letter, says : — 

I am the woman who so often importunes thee respecting Cod- 
rington, detained at the Conciergerie. The press of business essen- 
tial to the republic no doubt prevents thee from attending to private 
interests, but there are some which inspire the interest of every man 
of feeling, and this is just the case of my respectable relative. Thou 
wilt recognise his innocence. I only ask for justice. I ask thee as 
a particular favour to hasten his trial. He is exposed to all the 
dangers of a painful and rigorous detention. He is ill. My father 
and sister have left their home to carry him succour. My father is 
a public functionary. Duty calls him, friendship detains him. He 
has sacrificed his private interests. He cannot make those of the 
public suffer. If the misfortune of an unhappy family is entitled 
to thy consideration, in the name of humanity give a moment's 
attention to Codrington's affair. Finish it promptly. The reward 
of a good action and the merit of having done it as a good repub- 
lican ensure the gratitude of a woman who knows how to appreciate 
such sentiments. — I am, thy fellow-citizen, Vilde. 

Three weeks after Robespierre's fall, Madame Vilde, 

1 W. 124. 



376 PARIS IN 1789-94 

whom we may suspect of being something more than 
cousin to Codrington, writes to Fouquier : — 

Thou wilt doubtless, citizen, excuse the impatience of an unfor- 
tunate captive who longs for liberty. My cousin, not aware of the 
promise kindly given me by you to attend at once to his affair, 
reminded you of it by the letter which I addressed to thee. We 
await everything from thy justice, and I hope that it will restore to 
me my unfortunate relative, who has been so long ill. — I have the 
honour to salute thee with fraternity, thy fellow-citizen, 

Vilde. 1 

Fouquier had apparently quite forgotten Codrington, 
for he endorses this letter " Useless ; what does it refer 
to?" and the prisoner had still four months to wait for 
his liberation. 

Fouquier's notes relative to trials are of poignant 
interest. Thus we find directions how Danton and his 
fifteen fellow-prisoners were to be seated. " It must be 
so arranged that the accused are placed on the upper 
bench, the gendarmes occupying the lower one." This 
evidently implies a fear that the prisoners might force 
their way out of the dock and incite the spectators to 
join them, or that the spectators might forcibly liberate 
the captives. Danton, we find by this memorandum, 
sat between Herault de S^chelles and d'Espagnac. In 
preparing the indictment of the Dantonists Fouquier 
summarised the report of St. Just, inspired, as we 
know, by Robespierre. One of the charges against 
Desmoulins was that he had opposed the decree for the 
arrest of English residents in France, for which at the 
time "English newspapers thanked him." A note made 
during the trial of Adam Lux states that he "confessed 
everything, but refused to divulge his printer's name." 
The memoranda of Madame Roland's trial tell us 
nothing unfortunately of what she said, but we learn 
that Mademoiselle Mignot, the music teacher who, as 
we have seen, treacherously reported the conversations 

1 w. 151. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 377 

of Roland's dinner table, " confirmed her (previous) 
declaration " ; whereas the testimony of Lecoq, the man- 
servant, summoned with a like treacherous purpose, is 
described by Fouquier as rien. 

There is no record of the answers sent by Fouquier 
to the supplications addressed to him, but the Archives 
possess 1 the daily orders sent by him to Hanriot to 
provide the escort for the persons to be guillotined. 
These must have been found among Hanriot's papers, 
and they go up to the 8th Thermidor ; that of the 9th 
was perhaps still in Hanriot's pocket when he was 
captured and guillotined. Fouquier sometimes names all 
the persons condemned, but when there was a large 
batch he specifies only a few or merely gives the number. 
In the case of Madame Roland (he spells it Rolland) he 
says : " The public interest requires the execution to be 
tres pressee. The escort is to be ready at 3 o'clock." 
Fouquier places her name before that of Lamarche, which 
corroborates the story of her pleading for Lamarche 
to be executed first lest he should be still further 
unmanned by the spectacle of her death. Again on the 
20th April 1794, on the trial of the twenty-five Toulouse 
judges and others, Fouquier wrote to Hanriot : " As 
persons of this stamp may attract a considerable crowd, 
I invite you in your discretion to take the measures 
necessary, especially as the judgment will be pronounced 
to-day at 3 o'clock." 2 This shows that he took con- 
demnation for granted. The hour for starting varies 
from 7, 9, 10, and 11 A.M. to 3, 4, and 5 p.m. The 
" widow Capet " (Marie Antoinette), condemned at 4.30 
a.m., was executed at 10 ; the Girondins were guillotined 
at noon ; Danton at 4 P.M. The executions always took 
place by daylight. If the trial therefore lasted till dusk 
or later, the sentence was not carried out till next morning. 
Rabaut St. Etienne, the Protestant pastor and ex-deputy, 
being arrested at 4 A.M., and being outlawed, so that no 
trial, but merely identification, was necessary, was executed 
1 A.F. ii. 48. 2 Ibid. 47. 



37 8 PARIS IN 1789-94 

at 2 P.M. This was so unusual an hour that Fouquier, in 
filling up the printed form, wrote matin instead of soir, 
and had to correct this slip of the pen. 1 Fouquier himself, 
condemned with fourteen other Terrorists between 6 and 
7 P.M. on the 6th May 1795, had to wait till 11 next 
morning, for though the prisoners wished for instant 
death the executioner, not expecting the trial to end in 
time, had taken his departure. 

Among the papers preserved by Fouquier is a letter 
addressed by Sergent-Marceau on the 18th July 1793 to 
Hermann, president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, re- 
specting the execution of Charlotte Corday. Sergent, 
in the "Reminiscences of a Regicide," published by Mrs. 
Simpson in 1889, says : " I did not see this horror [the 
executioner slapping the victim's face], but as soon as I 
heard of it I wrote to the president of the tribunal, Hermand 
{sic), to ask that at next day's sitting the executioner might 
be subjected to a severe and public punishment for this 
crime against humanity. The judge thought as I did, and 
the man was imprisoned." 

Here is Sergent's letter. After applauding the Parisians 
for keeping at executions a silence interrupted only by 
cheers for the Republic, he says : — 

But yesterday the man charged with the painful function of 
executing judgments [Legros] indulged, in presence of the people, 
in reprehensible excesses over the remains of the monster who took 
the life of one of the representatives of the French people. The 
people had seen that woman pass to the scaffold, and had escorted 
her without insulting her last moments. They had inwardly 
applauded the judgment which awarded her the penalty she 
deserved, and the more their indignation against that unfortunate 
was legitimate and strong, the more proud and generous was their 
attitude and tranquil demeanour. At that moment they again 
baffled their enemies by the nobility of their conduct. Why did 
the citizen charged with the execution of the law allow himself to 
incite them to excesses 2 by adding to the punishment unpardonable 

1 Facsimile in Rivohition Frangaise, September 1898. 

2 This seems to imply that the mob applauded the act, but according to the 
Moniteur (xvii. 255) they murmured. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 379 

outrages? Magnanimous people, thou desirest only strict justice, 
no mercy, no leniency towards traitors or their accomplices; but 
thou desirest not vengeance, which would degrade thee. Vengeance 
is the property of weak and ferocious minds, but thou art invincible 
and kindly. I ask the tribunal to repair the outrage offered to the 
nation and to philosophy by the executioner who, conformably to 
law, showed the people the head of Charlotte Corday, but who 
allowed himself to load it with blows. This act, which would be 
repulsive on the part of any citizen, appeared to many criminal in 
him who religiously executes your judgment and the law. I ask 
therefore that he be censured in presence of the people at one of 
your sittings, and that you enjoin him to be more circumspect. 1 

Some punishment was inflicted on Legros, who was a 
carpenter by trade. Medical authorities deny that the 
blow could, as alleged, have caused a flush, which was 
either imaginary or existed before the decapitation, 
and Helen Williams probably gives the true version, viz., 
that the blush was the "last impression of offended 
modesty," caused by the. executioner taking off her 
neckerchief. 

On the 25th March 1794 the Madeleine cemetery was 
disused, being over full, and the garden adjoining Pare 
Monceau was assigned for the burials. The distance 
being thus greater, Fouquier directed that four mounted 
gendarmes should escort the carts from the place of 
execution to the cemetery. It is scarcely probable that 
these carts were the same as those, partly open at the 
side, in which the victims were taken to the guillotine ; 
but though several contemporaries speak of the horror of 
meeting the latter, we hear nothing of the carts containing 
the dead bodies, except from the abbe Carrichon, a witness 
of the execution of the Noailles family. He tells us that 
as each head fell it was thrown with the body into a 
cart painted red, and swimming with blood. Fouquier, 
according to Etienne Dumont, a witness at his trial, 
ordered the guillotine carts every morning before the 
trials began, but told the contractor to station them in 

1 W. 150. 



380 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the neighbouring squares, to avoid a bad impression on 
the public. Fouquier had also to engage vans to convey 
persons from other prisons to the Conciergerie, to be 
ready for trial, for there are letters from Cellier, inspector 
of military transports, 1 stating that three closed vans 
would always be at his disposal, one of them accom- 
modating twenty persons. These removals to the Con- 
ciergerie seem to have been carried out at night, to avoid 
notice and to prevent prisoners from appealing to people 
in the streets for rescue. 

On the 10th July 1794 the captain of the sixty gendarmes 
forming the escort to the guillotine informed Fouquier that 
one Conceau, 2 before mounting the cart, handed to a gen- 
darme a gold watch and chain and 100 francs for transmis- 
sion to his wife, but that the gendarme disappeared without 
waiting for the letter which was to accompany them. Con- 
ceau complained that the man had appropriated the articles, 
and described him as a short man. The captain began 
sending for the gendarmes, that Conceau might identify the 
culprit, but a citizen wearing an official scarf came up, 
and by threats of arrest forced the captain to abandon the 
investigation. There were probably many of such misap- 
propriations by keepers and turnkeys. 

I have mentioned that some of the jailors sent daily 
reports of the number of admissions and discharges. The 
old Port Royal convent had been re-named Port Libre, for 
names often went by contraries, and the jailor with uncon- 
scious irony headed his reports with the words " Maison de 
suspicion Port Libre." 

Whereas the other prisons were under the control of 
the sections in which they were situated and of the Conven- 
tion committees, Fouquier had jurisdiction, as I have said, 
over the Conciergerie and its annexes. These were ex- 
pressly exempted from a decree of the Convention of the 
10th October 1793 by which visits were forbidden, but 
letters on domestic affairs and personal wants allowed. 3 A 

1 W. 176-7. 2 No such name in Wallon's list. 

3 But latterly all correspondence seems to have been forbidden, for we hear of 
letters being concealed under dogs' collars or in linen sent to be washed. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 381 

decree of the 16th November ordering a common dietary, 1 
the rich to pay for the poor, seems also not to have been 
applied to Fouquier's captives, for there are among his 
papers a number of tradesmen's bills of later date, sent in 
to prisoners for the supply of eatables, as well as articles 
of furniture. In arbitrarily intercepting correspondence 
Fouquier may have been inspired by the Jacobin club, 
which regularly sent him reports of its deliberations, and 
which on the 12th March 1794 resolved that prisoners 
ought to be debarred visits and letters, or even the posses- 
sion of pens, ink, and paper. What is evident is that he 
made no announcement of his prohibition, but allowed 
prisoners and their friends to continue writing letters in 
ignorance of his ruthless suppression of them. 2 Nor 
assuredly did he vouchsafe an answer to anxious inquiries 
on both sides as to the consequent absence of tidings. He 
kept up this suppression even after Robespierre's fall, for 
there are letters of posterior date, and in one of these a 
prisoner states that that event had acted very beneficially on 
his health. 

The intercepted letters addressed to prisoners by families 
and friends are full of pathos. 3 Thus a wife informs her 
husband of the death of a child, and not unfrequently a 
child adds a few lines to the mother's letter. In one case 
two young children append each a line of greeting to the 
imprisoned father. A mother and her little girl may be in 
one prison, the father in another, and the girl expresses 

1 This was enforced on General O'Hara, though a prisoner of war. He 
evaded the rule for some weeks by pleading illness. He was subsequently allowed 
to go on parole to Chantilly. 

2 Chenier smuggled his poems by writing them in minute characters on narrow 
strips of paper, which he sent to his father, concealed in linen for the wash. 
Ginguene wrote letters to his wife on scraps of paper concealed in like manner, 
underlining in the list of linen the first letter of the one containing the document. 
Some of the warders, however, were open to bribes, and connived at corre- 
spondence. 

3 None of these intercepted letters are in a foreign language. The Germans, 
Belgians, English, and the few Americans who were incarcerated on various pre- 
texts, did not apparently attempt letter writing, doubtless because friends in 
France might have been compromised by communications, while letters to foreign 
countries had little chance of reaching their destination. 



382 PARIS IN 1789-94 

pride at having written so long a letter which she hopes 
will please her father, while the mother assures him that 
the girl wrote without any prompting. Husband and wife 
may even be in the same prison, but the two wards 
separated, so that the husband has to write and ask Fouquier 
for permission to see his wife. Many letters to prisoners 
accompany articles of food or clothing. A wife, for 
instance, sends socks, drawers, waistcoat, wine, and fruit. 
Another sends meat, turnips, and carrots, and asks her 
husband whether he needs anything else. A third forwards 
her husband cauliflowers, a pigeon, gooseberries, apricots, 
and wine. Registered letters containing assignats were 
naturally addressed by provincials to husbands or other 
relatives in Paris prisons, and in these cases the post-office 
did not deviate from its rule of sending a printed notice to 
the intended recipient, inviting him to call for the letter. 
Such a notice seems a bitter irony, for how could a prisoner 
comply with it ? It is true there was the option of sending 
somebody with a power of attorney, but this formality was 
probably difficult. I have come upon half-a-dozen such 
notices. These were evidently intercepted by Fouquier, 
and the registered letters must have awaited the release of 
discharged prisoners. 

As to letters written by prisoners, numberless captives 
wished their families or friends to procure them certificates 
of civism or revolutionary zeal, and it is sad to think that 
had not these letters been suppressed acquittals might 
perhaps have been obtained. Many provincials wrote to 
announce their arrival in Paris. One, who had as a boy 
been a student at Duplessis college, finds himself consigned 
there as a prisoner, and is reminded of his youthful pranks, 
but is so sanguine of acquittal that he intends to profit by 
his involuntary visit to Paris to look up old comrades. 
Prisoners also send letters with linen to be washed. How 
came letters of this kind into Fouquier's possession ? The 
articles were perhaps duly delivered, while the accompany- 
ing letters after perusal had to be handed over to the jailor, 
and passed on to Fouquier. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 383 

Many prisoners ask their families for money, clothes, 
and bedding. One requests his pipe and tobacco, as also 
letter-paper and pens. Another applies for a lettuce for a 
salad. Bisseau, probably the music-master "Bissot," who 
on the 27th April 1794 was sentenced to six years' impri- 
sonment for giving false certificates of residence to two 
reactionaries, had to ask his wife to arrange with two other 
citoyennes, "so as not to send more provisions than we 
need. . . . The exercise which we take is not sufficient to 
sharpen the appetite." 1 He was anxious, moreover, to 
economise, as if his detention was prolonged he would have 
to do with prison fare, " which though scanty enables us 
to be a burden to nobody." This shows us that prisoners 
clubbed together for meals, but it is a solitary instance of 
too ample supplies, and latterly prison fare, indeed, was 
compulsory. Prior to this regulation prisoners from whom 
the money in their possession had been taken on arriving in 
prison, could demand 50 francs a decade out of it for their 
maintenance, but there are many complaints that the jailor 
had withheld these instalments, or that the writers had 
been transferred to another prison without their money 
being also transferred. 

A prisoner addresses verses to his son, named Guillaume 
Tell, after the legendary Swiss hero. A wife expresses 
satisfaction, on the 21st July, that her husband was none 
the worse for the great heat, and a boy, Decaisne, writes to 
his captive mother on the 25th, " We are all well, and all 
embrace you. We hope soon to do so literally. I embrace 
the whole family." Five days later, Robespierre having 
meanwhile fallen, he writes again — "We are all well. Have 
patience. We shall shortly see you." The callousness of 
detaining such letters and even of prisoners' notes to 
counsel for their defence needs no comment. 

1 w. 177-179. 



CHAPTER X 

PRISON DOCUMENTS {continued) 

Farewell Letters of Victims of the Guillotine — Fouquier's Humanity 

But the high-water mark of Fouquier's brutality was the 
detention of farewell letters to wives, husbands, children,, 
or friends, by persons condemned to death. The poignant 
interest of such documents is obvious. "The hour of 
death," as Renan says, 1 " is essentially philosophical. At 
that moment everybody speaks his best, for you are in 
presence of the infinite, and are not tempted to make 
sonorous phrases." Until February 1899, when I gave 
about thirty of these letters in the Atlantic Monthly, none 
of them had ever been published, and possibly descendants 
now living may learn for the first time from this book what 
were the last lines penned by their unfortunate ancestors.. 
Victor Hugo in his Dernier Jour d'un Condamne drew on 
his powerful imagination, but here we have the genuine 
outpourings of the heart on the approach of death. Written 
on sheets or scraps of paper of every variety of form and 
quality, the ink now faded, they cannot be handled without 
emotion. 2 We can realise the Terror more vividly when we 
read these tragical farewells. Resignation, as will be seen,, 
is the dominant note ; but not all of the victims possessed 
equal fortitude at the thought of leaving wives and children, 
perhaps in penury, and one writer tells us that his letter 
was watered with tears. Forgiveness of enemies is also 
frequently expressed ; only in one instance is there a breath 
of malediction. Some of the victims enjoyed religious 
consolations ; others felt merely a possibility of a future: 

1 Abbesse de Jouarre. 

2 W. in, 115, 117, 123, 131, 134, 145, 146, 147, 168; U. 1019, 1021. 

384 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 385 

state with the renewal of family ties. We can fancy the 
prisoners employing their few remaining moments in these 
assurances of affection ; sympathising fellow-captives, per- 
haps, standing round who knew not how soon their own 
turn might come. Death would have had an additional 
sting had they known that these harrowing farewells, cyni- 
cally scanned by the brutal Fouquier, would be tossed 
aside to lie neglected for a century. 

I retain the second person singular wherever used, for 
the French still employ it in addressing near relations or 
intimate friends, as well as in invoking the Deity. This dis- 
tinction we have unhappily lost, for by the beginning of 
the sixteenth century thou had become contumelious. " I 
thou thee, thou traitor," said Coke to the unfortunate 
Raleigh, and George Fox could not succeed in rehabili- 
tating it. The French Jacobins were equally unsuccessful 
in attempting to make tutoiement universal, though among 
Paris cabmen it still lingers. 

It is difficult to give the exact equivalent of terms of 
endearment. Literally translated, some would seem more 
effusive than they really are (for words by wear often lose 
much of their original force), while others would appear 
cold. Mon cher ami, ma chere amie, for instance, mean 
much more than " my dear friend." It is a common form 
of address between husband and wife, and I have usually 
rendered it by "dearest." If, nevertheless, some expres- 
sions are too gushing for Anglo-Saxon tastes, we must 
make allowance for national temperament, and for the high 
pitch to which emotions had been worked up by the 
Revolution. 

I give the letters in chronological order, not merely 
because any other arrangement would be arbitrary, but 
because it is necessary to bear in mind the successive 
stages of the Terror. The victims were at first entirely, or 
mostly, Royalists ; for the Revolution began by devouring 
its enemies, but ended, as Vergniaud foreboded, by de- 
vouring, like Saturn, its own children. The later sufferers 
were mostly Republicans, as stanch Republicans as their 

2 B 



386 PARIS IN 1789^94 

persecutors, and were slaughtered for a simple nuance, or 
through private spite. They were executed as Federalists. 
Ultimately, indeed, there were also Hebertists, butchered 
because they were too violent, but only one of them seems 
to have written a farewell letter. In politics, therefore, the 
letters show what musicians term a crescendo, while in 
religion they exhibit just the reverse — the decline or eclipse 
of faith, yet no avowed materialism. Subject to exceptions, 
moreover, the social status of the victims steadily lowers. 
We have, it is true, an aristocrat like Victor de Broglie, but 
among the later victims we find small tradesmen, wine- 
shop keepers, and men in still humbler positions, which 
would account for their rude penmanship and ortho- 
graphy. 

But the letters may now speak for themselves. 

Louis Alexandre Beaulieu, aged 36, was a trades- 
man, who had been commissioned by Mauny, a retired 
dragoon officer, to procure gold and silver — an illegal 
transaction, concealed in his letters under the terms red 
and white wine, which meant yellow and white coins. 
Both Beaulieu and Mauny were executed May 10, 1793. 
Beaulieu spent his last hours in writing three letters. 



To His Wife. 

Be consoled, my very good lady and beloved — be consoled, I 
entreat you. I have a calmness and firmness of mind which are a 
great help to me at this moment. The greatest grief which I feel is 
the causing you grief. It is this which makes me beg you, as the 
last favour, to console yourself. Take care of yourself. You owe 
this to those of whom you are the mainstay. Share my adieux with 
the kind and dear Adelaide. I might have been taken from you by 
illness or accident. Farewell. I embrace you from the bottom of 
my heart. I expected to have plenty of time to write to you. Adieu 
•once more. Your beloved, L. A. Beaulieu. 

Once more adieu. I love you ever with all my heart. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 387 

II 

To Citoyenne Becagny, Rue Liberte, 27, to whom I beg you to 
hand the watch-key. 

My dear and kind friend, I embrace you for the last time. 
Accept all my gratitude for the trouble and vexations which I have 
caused you, and forgive them. I fear lest your interests should 
suffer from the 2000 f. which you lately sent me, and for which you 
have no receipt. I wish this to serve for one. I owe you also 
several sums on current account which may amount to 400 f. or 
500 f. I acknowledge the debt. Kindly express my thanks to 
MM. Collot, Julianne, and Alexandre. I have not time to say 
more, as I did not begin to write till eight in the morning. I 
embrace you thousands of times, and am always to the last moment 
your ever sincere friend, L. A. Beaulieu. 

Ill 

To Citizen Beaulieu Freval, Rue Tibotoni, No. 27. 

Adieu, my friend. Thy consolation should be found in reason 
.and philosophy. [Here he repeats some of the expressions in his 
second letter.] Remove from your mind this sad event, and remem- 
oer only our days of intimacy. I might have been taken from you 
by illness or accident, and in time of war one is too happy in 
•escaping. I might have had the misfortune of succumbing. Look 
at the event in this light. Adieu. I embrace thee thousands of 
times. Console all my friends. Speak to them of my friendship. — 
Your brother and friend, L. A. Beaulieu. 

Enclosed are a letter and a watch-key, which thou wilt deliver to 
rthe same destination. 

In the autumn of 1792 an association for organising an 
insurrection in Brittany in order to rescue Louis XVI. was 
formed by the marquis de la Rouerie, who, under the name 
of Colonel Armand, had fought for American independence 
-from 1776 till the end of the war. He died, however, heart- 
broken by the news of the King's execution, and the rising 
was postponed or abandoned. But all the documents 
relating to it, concealed in a bottle buried in a garden, 



388 PARIS IN 1789-94 

were seized, through the treachery of a doctor named 
Chevetel, and on the 18th June 1793 twelve of the sub- 
scribers or adherents to the association were condemned 
to death. Five of these have left farewell letters. One 
of them, Franchise Desilles, aged 24, was cousin of 
la Rouerie, and wife of a naval officer who had quitted 
France. The letter is probably addressed to her sister-in- 
law, and she might have saved her life by revealing the fact 
that the name in the list of subscribers was not her own 
but that of the sister-in-law. When urged, however, by her 
counsel, for the sake of her children to explain the mistake, 
she replied, " My sister-in-law also is a mother." 

IV 

\ZthJune 1793. 
My lot is cast, dearest. Do not be grieved, but view the event 
with as much tranquillity as I do. It is not without regret that I 
quit an existence which promised me happy days. I have one 
favour to ask. You know what is the fate of my unfortunate chil- 
dren. Be a mother to them, dearest ; let them find in you an 
affectionate and beloved mother. I am convinced of the zeal with 
which you will be their mother. Adieu, dear. I will not further 
prolong the time that I am spending in conversing with you. I 
have to approach the Supreme Being, at whose feet I cast myself. 
The resignation given me by the sweet persuasion that He will 
forgive me gives me joy. Speak of me to my children, but repel all 
bitterness. My trials are coming to an end, but yours will last. 
Adieu, dear. Cherish my memory, but do not lament my fate. 

Desilles de la Fauchais. 

I beg you, dear, to arrange with my sisters for the education of 
my children. They have no resource but you three, and it is to 
you three that I confide them to serve them as mother. 

Jean Baptiste Georges Fontevieux, a native of Zwei- 
briicken, a retired officer, aged 34, another of the 
Breton conspirators, living at St. Brieuc, employed his last 
moments in writing to his wife, father, mother, sister, his 
notary, a female friend, and the second letter that follows, 
addressed to three fellow-prisoners at the Abbaye. He also 
wrote to the Convention for a respite, that he might adduce 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 389 

evidence to exculpate him, for the alleged conspiracy, he 
said, was imaginary. All these letters are written in a 
plain, firm hand. 

V 

To Citoyenne Cambry, Rue de la Revolution, No. 28, near the 
ci-devant Place Louis XV., Paris. 

I approach, my friend, the terrible moment when I am to appear 
before the Supreme Being. I behold its coming without alarm. I 
may say with Essex — 

" C'est le crime qui fait la honte, 
Ce n'est pas Pechafaud." 1 

Thou knowest the purity of the sentiments which have always 
animated me. Without lacking modesty I may say I have done all 
the good in my power. I have done ill to none. I regret my 
friends. I was attached to earth only by their affection, and I do 
not feel misfortune except on their account. I thank thee for the 
testimonies of friendship and consolation which thou hast furnished 
me, and the touching attentions which thou hast lavished on me 
during my captivity. I would fain testify my warm and affectionate 
gratitude. We shall be reunited sooner or later. The scythe of 
Time visits all heads, it levels all. I pity my judges. I forgive 
them with all my heart. I beg thee to console thyself. I conjure 
thee in the name of the warmest affection to preserve thy life. If 
ever thou chancest to think of me, remember that, as I die innocent, 
I am bound to be happy. I have not shed a tear for myself, but I 
have wept over the painful situation of my friends. It is they who 
are to be pitied, not I. Adieu, kind and affectionate friend; I 
•embrace thee with all my heart. If thou shouldst see my uncle 
cheer him up ; help him to bear the misfortunes attaching to human 
existence. Tell him that I loved him, love him still, and shall love 
him beyond the tomb. Fontevieux. 

VI 

\WiJune 1793. 

I have been this morning, dear companions in misfortune, con- 
demned to death by the Revolutionary tribunal. The interest 

1 From a drama by Thomas Corneille. The proper reading is, "Le crime 
fait la honte, et non pas l'echafaud." 



39° PARIS IN 1789-94 

which you have shown me and your desire to learn the judgment 
from my own lips induce me to inform you of it. Alas, you were 
far from thinking it would be this. May you fare better. Adieu, 
my friends. I am, and soon shall be, perfectly tranquil. 

Fontevieux. 

Nicolas Bernard Grout de la Motte, aged 50, a retired 
naval officer, was another of the Breton conspirators. 



VII 

To Citizen Fouquier-Tinville. 

\%th June 1793. 
Citizen, I beg you to allow my ring and a case with portraits of 
my late wife and of my daughter to be restored to two young 
children whom I leave. It is a small favour which I ask you, and 
it will be a portion of my property which could not be of any use 
to the nation. 1 These young children are at St. Malo. . . . Will 
you allow my linen to be given to the citizen gendarme ? 

Grout de la Motte. 

Three quarto pages are so closely filled by the following 
letter as to leave no room for the signature, but the address 
shows the writer to have been Georges Julien Jean Vincent, 
aged 48, broker and interpreter at St. Malo, also one of the 
Breton conspirators. 

VIII 

To Citoyenne Binel Vincent, Rue de Toulouse, St. Malo: 

\%th June 1793. 
There are decrees of Divine Providence, my beloved, kind, and 
affectionate friend, which, however terrible to bear, we ought to 
accept and submit to without a murmur. Thou knowest better 
than I, and I have no need to remind thee, all that religion 
commands thee, and all the consolations which it can give thee. 
Alas, what a terrible blow I am about to inflict on thy tender and 
generous heart, and how my poor and beloved children are about 
to be grieved ! But, my dearest, collect all your strength. Pray do 

1 All the property of guillotined persons was confiscated. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 391 

not be cast down by misfortune. My innocence and honour should 
help you to bear your misfortune. God had joined us together. 
I possessed an affectionate and virtuous wife who was my comfort. 
Perhaps, alas, I was too proud of the happiness which I possessed, 
and God's will deprives me of it. Worthy and affectionate wife, if 
I ever vexed thee I beg thee to forgive me. I shall die worthy of 
thy love, and if after this unfortunate life we can still preserve 
some recollection of persons who have been dear to us in this 
world, I shall carry beyond the tomb the deep affection which I 
have devoted to thee as well as to my dear children. Oh, 
affectionate and beloved wife, if ever I have been dear to thee, I 
conjure thee by all our affection to continue living ; our beloved 
children have so much need of thee. Embrace them very 
affectionately for me. Tell them all the affection which I have 
always had for them. Tell them that if my death unhappily 
deprives them not only of the most affectionate father, but of the 
little property which they might claim, I die innocent and leave 
them honour, the most precious property ; and not only that, but 
they can hold their heads erect in such a fashion as to make their 
father's death a glory as an innocent victim of the law. Beware, 
my dearest, lest sorrow for my death should render them un- 
grateful towards their country. It is not the country which is the 
cause of the misfortunes which overwhelm us. Men are liable to 
error, and at a moment when passions blind us, innocence is often 
mistaken for guilt. As good and faithful Christians, we must know 
how to bear the blows which befall us and adore the divine hand 
which overwhelms us. Oh, my dear children, console your worthy 
and affectionate mother, and by your assiduity in obeying her 
counsels, as well as in fulfilling the duties of your religion, be 
the consolation of her agony. I embrace you, my dear good 
Republican friends. I pray God for you, and thou, dear and 
affectionate wife, receive my last kisses and adieux. Remember 
me only to beseech God to pardon my sins and have pity on my 
soul. I cannot say more. Words fail me at this sad and cruel 
moment, in which, however, I do not regret life except for the 
pain which my death is about to inflict on thy heart. But, my 
dearest, do not give way to grief. Respect the decrees of Divine 
Providence. We were not fated to remain for ever on this poor 
earth, and we certainly knew when we married that death would 
part us. God has fixed the moment and manner. Let us there- 
fore submit without a murmur to His will. Adieu, dear and 
worthy spouse. Adieu, loving and beloved children. Receive my 



392 PARIS IN 1789-94 

affectionate kisses, and Heaven grant that you may be more 
fortunate than your unfortunate father, who dies innocent and 
without self-reproach. 

There is no signature also to the following letter, but 
the writer was probably Michel Julien Picot de Limoelan, 
brother-in-law to la Rouerie, still another of the Breton 
conspirators. 

IX 

To Citizen Vendel, Maison de la Trinity Fougeres. 

\Zth June [1793]. 
I shall be near the Eternal, my friend, when you receive this 
letter. I hope the forgiveness of my enemies will procure that of 
my faults, my crimes, toward Him ; for the frequent forgetfulness 
of His benefits is doubtless one which could not be too dearly 
expiated, and the sacrifice of some years is not a great thing for 
him who knows how to estimate life at its true value. The sentence 
of death could not trouble me, for all the tribulations that I have 
experienced since my arrest have sufficiently disgusted me with life. 
. . . Adieu, my poor friend. Do not forget me. I die with 
confidence, and almost with joy. At what a grand banquet I shall 
be present this evening ! My beloved, I shall await you. Your 
virtues call you thither. I had no cause for self-reproach toward 
men. I have never had any sentiments but those of humanity. 
I sincerely desire the happiness of those who conduct me to the 
tomb, but toward God, my friend, I was not so guiltless. I loved 
Him, but I served Him ill. I trust He will forgive me. Let not 
my friends weep over my happiness. We shall soon meet again. 
Convey my respects to them. Adieu, my unfortunate friend. I have 
taken every possible precaution to forward you the remainder of 
the assignats which you lent me. 

Claude Francois Berger, aged 64, farmer, of the 
Nievre, was convicted on the 13th September 1793 of 
having written, though he had shown them to nobody, 
papers expressing indignation against the regicides. His 
wife had apparently accompanied him on his mission to 
Paris from his native department. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 393 

X 

To Citoyenne Berger, Paris. 

Adieu, my dear daughter, adieu for ever. I am condemned for 
having, it is said, fomented and excited a counter-revolution. I 
never thought of so doing, but the truth is that I am a Catholic, 
and that I have shown too strong an attachment to the religion of 
our fathers. Bless and praise God for all. I commend myself to 
thy prayers and those of our friends, whom I shall never see again 
except in Eternity. I am about to appear there in a few hours. 
God grant me mercy, and forgive my innumerable sins, as I forgive 
with all my heart my judges, who have evidently been mistaken in 
convicting me of a crime which was never in my thoughts. God 
forgive also my enemies, who are the cause of my arrest and death. 
Console thy poor mother, my dear children. Support her in her 
old age and in the terrible affliction which will befall her. Let her 
take her misfortune to the foot of the Cross, and leave herself to the 
guidance of Divine Providence, ever just and adorable, however 
terrible. I again beg thee to care for the old age of thy mother, 
and to entreat thy brothers and sisters to sustain and console her as 
far as they can. ... I ask my poor wife's pardon for the vexations 
which I may have caused her. Let her forgive me, and remember 
me always in her prayers. I forgive thy eldest brother the vexations 
which he has caused me, especially by his marriage. God forgive 
him ! I forgive also thy eldest and youngest sisters the vexations 
which they have caused me by their disobedience, and their dis- 
regard for me and their mother. God grant them sincere repent- 
ance ! Let them repair their faults by redoubled affection and 
submission towards their poor mother, my beloved and afflicted 
spouse, whom I embrace for the last time with all my heart. I 
embrace Nanette, my dear daughter. Let her continue to care for 
her poor mother. God will recompense her. I pray to Him and 
shall pray to Him in Heaven if He has pity on my poor soul, as I 
implore and hope from His infinite mercy through the precious blood 
of His Son, our Lord. I die on a Friday, the day consecrated to 
His passion and death. My children, never forget your father in 
your prayers, and entreat all our friends to pray for me. Never 
forget your duties to your mother, to God, and to the country. I 
embrace thee again. I am now about to prepare for death by 
resignation to the will of God. Wish no ill to those who have 
instigated my death, and never try to avenge it. That of Jesus 



394 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Christ is not yet avenged. I am innocent, moreover, of what is> 
imputed to me, and am firmly persuaded that unsigned writings 
seemed to deserve punishment. No matter, dearest. I am resigned 
to the will of the Most High, who has thus permitted me to expiate 
here below my horrible sins, and in whose mercy I trust. Adieu, 
my dear daughter, adieu. Heaven bless thee, and fill thee with its 
grace, the only true good. 

Conciergerie, iT,tk September 1793, 3.15 P.M. 

Jeanne Charlotte de Rutant, aged 22, a native of Lor- 
raine, was convicted on the 5th October 1793 of corre- 
spondence with the enemies of the Republic. She had 
written to an emigre relative in sympathetic ink, and had 
expressed desires for the success of the invaders. The letter,, 
unsigned, but traced to her, had been intercepted. She was 
first imprisoned at Nancy, as also was her father, who, 
though in close confinement, heard that she was about to 
be sent to Paris for trial. He drew up, and his wife 
printed, an address to the local authorities in which he 
protested against her removal to Paris, but in that case 
begged permission to accompany her, either as co-accused 
or as adviser and comforter. The appeal was unavailing. 
The subjoined letter is addressed to her busband. 

XI 

To Citizen Andre Rutant, Rue Sidle, Paris. 

14 Vendemiaire, year 2. 
Courage, dearest, and encourage your unfortunate parents. Be 
all consoled, but do not forget me. Thou, dearest, still more than 
my other relatives, whom I have offended, forgive, I beg thee, all 
that may have annoyed thee in my conduct. I have up to this 
moment fully expiated those wrongs, if anything can expiate them. 
I hope that my hair will be given thee, which would not have been 
touched by the executioner if I could have imagined that there was 
a man like the public prosecutor, who alone is responsible for my 
death ; but as God, that Omnipotent whom I implore for all my 
friends, will one day judge him, I forgive him ; at least I hope so. 
I trust that my excellent, my most affectionate sister, will not remain 
long in this city. I count on her presence for mitigating the grief 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 395 

of my incomparable father. Thou also, my beloved, thou wilt be 
near him at this cruel moment. I constantly think of him when he 
will learn my fate ; but whatever grief all whom I leave in the world 
makes me feel, the Supreme Being sustains my courage. I hope 
that He will not fail me. I implore Him for you all, my friends. 
Divide my hair, my beloved ones, and do not forget me except 
when the recollection will be too painful. Farewell ! I beg my 
friends to testify my gratitude to citizen Chauveau. 1 Those of my 
fellow-citizens who were present at my trial seemed to take an 
interest in the unfortunate accused. I hope there will be no 
resentment against him for having consented to undertake the 
defence of an unfortunate being very grateful for the interest which 
he accorded her. 

At 10 o'clock on Sunday night, the 2nd June 1793, the 
Convention, under the coercion of a Jacobin mob, excluded 
thirty-two members from its deliberations, and ordered that 
they should be under arrest at their own houses. On the 
28th July St. Just reported that Gorsas and fifteen others 
had escaped from Paris, whereupon nine of the remainder 
were thrown into prison. Among these was Armand Gen- 
sonne, a Bordeaux lawyer, 35 years of age, who had been 
a prominent figure in the Convention, one of Paine's 
eight colleagues on the Constitution Committee, a strenuous 
opponent of royalty, but also a strenuous opponent of 
Jacobinism. On the 19th August Marc David Lasource r 
aged 39, was likewise arrested. These deputies were at first 
confined at the Luxembourg, where detention was of a mild 
character, but on the 8th September they were transferred 
to the Conciergerie, literally and figuratively the vestibule 
of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Thence Lasource, on the 
14th, applied for the arrears of his 18 francs a day parlia- 
mentary stipend, failing to obtain which he wrote to his 
wife for 5000 francs. She raised that sum, and remitted it 
by bill of exchange to Perez, a fellow-deputy, for him 
to deliver it to her husband. By this time, however, it 
had been decided that Lasource and twenty-one of his 

1 Chauveau-Lagarde, one of the barristers assigned for the defence of prisoners. 
He was himself arrested on the 1st July and imprisoned till the ioth August. 



396 PARIS IN 1789-94 

colleagues should be brought to trial. Perez detained the 
money, pending the result of the trial, and it was ulti- 
mately confiscated, along with Lasource's other possessions. 
The trial commenced on the 24th October, and seemed 
likely to be lengthy ; but on the 28th the Convention 
decreed that juries of the Revolutionary Tribunal might at 
any time, when sufficiently enlightened, cut short the pro- 
ceedings. Accordingly, the prisoners' defence was sup- 
pressed, and at ten at night on the 30th, after three hours' 
deliberation by the jury, the twenty-two deputies were 
condemned. How Nodier fabricated an account of their 
^'last supper" and conversation, and how Lamartine added 
further embellishments, need not be told. The truth is 
that they were shut up in groups in their cells, able to sing 
in unison, but not to hold high converse on human destiny. 
We have tangible, and till now unpublished, evidence of 
how two of them employed at least a few minutes of that 
last night and morning. Gensonne wrote farewells to his 
father and wife, and Lasource one to his wife. Here are 
the letters : — 



XII 

To Citizen Gensonne, care of Citizen Lacaze, Libourne. 

Conciergerie, 31^ October 1793, or \Qth day of the 
2nd month of the second year of the Republic. 

My very dear father, receive the last embraces of an affectionate 
^on, who has constantly honoured your rare virtues and has loved 
you every moment of his life. It is in the presence of death, which 
in a few hours will cut off the remainder of a life entirely devoted 
to professing the sentiments of an honest man, that I declare I carry 
away with me a pure heart, a conscience without reproach. Tell this 
to my children. Tell them of my love for them. Teach them to be 
devoted to the country and to love liberty, the only blessing to which 
a Frenchman can aspire. I commend them to your paternal good- 
will and kindness. I press in my arms my affectionate mother, all 
the family, and all my friends. Having discharged this duty, so dear 
to my heart, I go to death with the calmness and serenity which 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 397 

crime would never have possessed. My memory will not be sullied. 
It is impossible for men to deprive me of it. These are the senti- 
ments which I express to you, and which should console your old 
age. Adieu, my respected and most beloved of fathers. Adieu. 



XIII 

To Citoyenne Gensonn£, Hotel Necker, Rue Richelieu, Paris. 

Adieu, my beloved. Love me in our children, and preserve 
the recollection of a man whom thou hast made happy, and whose 
thoughts to his last moment will be of thee. I charge thee 
to bestow on my mother the care which I can no longer offer 
her. Adieu. 



XIV 

To Citoyenne Lasource, Cambon, Tarn. 

1st November [this is cancelled 
and 31^ October substituted], morning. 

I beg my dear wife, whom I embrace with all my heart,. 
to pay to citizen Thierry, the general prison doctor, the sum 
of 300 f. for the attentions which he has been good enough to 
bestow on me, and 100 f. to citizen Coupe, the prison surgeon. 
I beg her also to pay 26 f. to citizen Dugard, Protestant minister 
in the Saintonge country. Citizen Laroque will inform her of 
the address of the latter. I repeat to my dear wife my gratitude 
for all the expense which she has incurred for me. I embrace 
her once more. 

Antoine Joseph Gorsas, aged 40, had preceded his 
colleagues to the tomb. Imprudently returning to Paris 
after failing to excite a Girondin rising at Caen and 
Bordeaux, he was recognised by a passer-by while talking 
to a friendly bookseller's wife in the Palais Royal, was 
arrested, and being an outlaw was executed without trial, 
on the simple proof of identity by three co-tenants of 
his house. He was attended to the scaffold by a con- 
stitutional priest, whom he embraced. 



398 PARIS IN 1789-94 

XV 
To Citizen Fouquier-Tinville. 

"]tk October [1793]. 
Before dying, I desire that my creditors whose bills are unsettled 
should not be losers. I declare that I owe [three debts men- 
tioned]. I recommend this note to the citizen public accuser. I beg 
him in the name of justice to pay these sums. 1 My hope that 
he will be good enough to do it will be a feeling of gratitude 
which I shall take away with me. My unfortunate family are 
prosecuted. If I had committed crimes, let me alone bear the 
responsibility. My family are not guilty. Will not my death 
satisfy public justice? I end by affirming that never have I 
betrayed my country, and that my last wishes are for its happi- 
ness and for its enjoyment of rest and happiness after so many 
long agitations. A. J. Gorsas. 

P.S. — I may have other debts of which I am ignorant. I 
acknowledge them also. 

There is nothing to show that Fouquier carried out 
these last wishes, but it is satisfactory to reflect that 
the Convention not only on the 13th October 1795 
celebrated the memory of these and other "martyrs of 
liberty," but ordered payment to their widows or families 
of the 18 francs a day stipend up to its own dissolution. 
Lasource's wife had apparently died, but his mother in 
April 1797 received a pension. Marie Madelaine Roudier, 
Madame Gorsas, left destitute with three young children, 
on the 1st February 1794 — that is to say, even during the 
Terror — had been awarded 300 francs by the Convention, 
but it is lamentable to find that this was a kind of 
reward for her disclaimer of her husband's opinions. On 
Christmas Day 1793 she sent in a petition in which, 
asking that his printing plant might be assigned to her 
as dower or personal property, she said : — 

Reduced with her family to the greatest straits, doomed to 
regrets which will end only with her life, without her having in 
any way shared the opinions and errors of her husband, who, 

1 Of course out of the money due to Gorsas as a deputy. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 399 

too much attached to his opinion, carefully concealed it even 
from his wife, well knowing that she would not entertain it; 
deprived of his affection and confidence, she hopes the fathers 
of the people will consider both the past afflictions of her life 
and the misfortunes which threaten her, if the law which has 
punished her husband entails on her the deprivation of the rights 
which the national laws allowed her to claim, and the faculty 
of obtaining from your commiseration the means of subsistence 
and of bringing up her unfortunate family. 1 

In May 1796 she received a pension of 2000 francs, 
as also did the widows of Buzot, Barbaroux, Petion, and 
Bailly. She continued or revived her husband's printing 
business, published the second part of Paine's " Age of 
Reason," and in 1799 started a newspaper called the 
Grondeur. 

Olympe de Gouges, born at Montauban in 1784, is 
believed to have been the daughter of the Marquis 
Franc de Pompignan, a versifier. Her mother, Olympe 
or Olinde Mousset, was the wife of Pierre Gouze, a 
butcher. After a marriage in 1765 with a man named 
Aubry, which soon ended in a separation, Olympe went 
up to Paris, and, though never able to spell or to write 
a decent hand, published several plays. She threw her- 
self with ardour into the Revolution, and was a strenuous 
advocate of woman's rights, saying, " Woman is entitled 
to mount the scaffold, she should also be entitled to 
mount the tribune." She offered to defend Louis XVI. 
in order to prove, not his innocence, but his imbecility. 
Her tirades against Robespierre at last led to her arrest, 
and after seven months' imprisonment she was tried, and 
guillotined on the 3rd November 1793. Her son, to 
whom she addressed an ill-written and ill-spelt letter, 
wrote, on being dismissed from the army, to the Con- 
vention to repudiate all sympathy with his mother's 
opinions. The only excuse for his act is that he cannot 
have known of her having written to him, or of the 
letter to the Convention entreating news of him. His 

1 C. 289. 



400 PARIS IN 1789-94 

wife, more affectionate, visited her in prison. Olympe's 
papers were in 1796 restored to her mother. 



XVI 

To the President of the National Convention. 

I am condemned to death for having, alas, idolised the 
revolution, and I do not complain. May my enemies forgive 
themselves this crime, just as I forgive them. Ill, without 
counsel, I had only my innocence to support me. Alas, I do 
not ask you to annul this incredible condemnation. I have been 
for some days by unequivocal signs enceinte. Without doubt my 
grief and the persecution which I have experienced will not 
allow me to reach my delivery, but I shall at least have the 
pleasure before my last hour of receiving news of my son. He 
is in our republican armies, especially in that of the Rhine, as 
a general officer. I ask the Convention, in the name of nature 
and of a being ferociously precipitated into the tomb, to give 
me news of that son in the prison where I am cast so as to 
be dead to the world of the living. I cannot receive news except 
through the Convention itself. It will not refuse me at least this 
act of humanity for all the services which I have rendered to the 
country, the people, and liberty, which my sentence of death is 
about to immortalise. Olympe Degouge. 

XVII 

To Citizen de Gouge, General Officer in the Army of the 

Rhitie. 

I die, my dear son, a victim of my idolatry of justice and of the 
people. Its enemies, under the specious mask of republicanism, 
have conducted me without remorse to the scaffold. After seven 
months of captivity I was transferred to a maison de sante, 1 where I 
was as free as in my own house. I might have escaped. My 
enemies and executioners are aware of this, but, convinced that the 
ill-will concerted to ruin me could not succeed in reproaching me 
with a single act contrary to the Revolution, I myself asked for trial. 
Could I believe that unmuzzled tigers would themselves be judges, 
against the law, against that popular assembly which will soon 

1 Private hospital. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 401 

reproach them with my death ? The indictment was delivered to 
me three days before my trial. The law entitled me to counsel. 
All the persons of my acquaintance have been intercepted. I was, 
as it were, in solitary confinement, not being even able to speak to 
the concierge. The law also entitled me to select my jurors. The 
list of them was announced to me at midnight, and next morning at 
seven o'clock I was taken to the tribunal, ill and weak, and without 
having the art of speaking in public. Resembling Jean Jacques 
[Rousseau] in his virtues, I felt all my insufficiency. I asked for 
the counsel whom I had chosen. I was told he was not present, 
or had refused to undertake my cause. Failing him, I asked for 
another. I was told I was quite able to defend myself. Without 
doubt I have strength enough to defend my innocence, which is 
self-evident to all spectators. It was impossible to dispute all the 
services and benefits which I have rendered to the people. Twenty 
times I made my executioners turn pale, not knowing how to 
answer me. At every sentence which showed my innocence and 
their bad faith. . . . They pronounced my doom for fear of ex- 
posure of the iniquity of which the world has not had sufficient 
examples. Adieu, my son, I shall be no more when thou receivest 
this letter. ... I die, my son, my dear son, I die innocent. All 
the laws have been violated against the most virtuous woman of her 
age. [She then tells him where to find the pawn-ticket for her 
jewels.] Olympe Degouge. 

Guillaume Antoine Lemoine, 37, farmer, outlawed on 
the 6th August as a member of the Girondin commission 
at Bordeaux, was executed without trial on simple identifi- 
cation on the 2nd November 1793. 

XVIII 

To Citizen Lafon, Hotel de Versailles, Paris. 

Courage, my friend, courage. My dear Duhayet, I am con- 
demned, and am about immediately to march to the scaffold. Care 
for my father, to whom I do not write. Be his solace. Do not 
quit him for a moment, and hasten all of you to Bordeaux to console 
my sister, whom I beg you to bid farewell for me. Testify to my 
father my sense of all his goodness to me. Tell him that proud of 
my innocence I die calm, and with the courage which has never 
abandoned me. I hope that my punishment will appease the 

2C 



402 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Almighty, who doubtless wished to punish me in this world for my 
faults, and we shall meet again one day in a blessed eternity. Watch 
especially over dear papa. Try and mitigate the bitterness with 
which my punishment will load him. His goodness, his sensibility, 
ensures that he will never forget a son who loves as greatly as he 
respects him. Care also for my sister. You know how dear she is 
to me. Adieu, my friend, and do not forget me. Your good friend 
and brother, Lemoine. 

Marie Madeleine Coutelet, aged 32, was forewoman at 
the flax-spinning factory established in the Jacobin mon- 
astery in July 1790 to give employment to women and 
girls. Her sister, who occupied the room above her, 
having been denounced as corresponding with emigres, 
the commissaries sent with a search warrant went by 
mistake to Madeleine's room. She informed them of their 
blunder, but invited them to search her apartment. They 
found a letter addressed to her aunt at Rheims, but never 
posted, expressing sympathy for the Queen. Her ex- 
planation was that though really a "patriot" she wrote 
the letter in joke, to mystify a friend to whom alone she 
showed it. She was condemned on the 4th November 
1793. Her sister, Marie Louise Neuveglise, shared the 
same fate on the 23rd April 1794. 

XIX 

I discharge my last duty. You know that the law has judged 
me. They have found crime in innocence, and it is thus that they 
sentence me to die. I hope that you will be consoled. It is the 
last favour which I ask. I die with the purity of soul of those who 
die with joy. Adieu. Receive my last embrace. It is that of the 
most affectionate daughter and most attached sister. I regard this 
day as the finest that I have been granted by the Supreme Being. 
Live and think of me. Rejoice at the bliss which awaits me. I 
embrace my friends (amies), and am grateful to those who gave 
testimony for me. Adieu for the last time. May your children be 
happy ! It is my last wish. Coutelet. 

' Madeleine Frangoise Josephine Dorabec, aged 35, widow 
of Paul Pierre Kolly, was convicted on the 3rd May 1793, 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 403 

together with her husband and her lover, of complicity in 
the conspiracy in Brittany, but pleaded pregnancy, and 
was respited and left unnoticed till the following November, 
when Olympe de Gouge, on her own plea of pregnancy 
being rejected, said "Madame Kolly, who has confessed 
to me that she is not pregnant, has been more fortunate 
than I." Thereupon Madame Kolly, after a fruitless appeal 
to the Convention, was executed. She left two sons by her 
first husband, Foucand, the elder twelve years of age, and 
a third, five years old, by her second, Paul de Kolly, a 
revenue farmer. They were with her in prison, but found 
an adoptive father in " citoyen Ferriere," the General Secu- 
rity Committee handing them over to him in order to 
rescue them from "the vices of prisons." 1 

XX 

To Citoyenne Moyroud, Rue St. Dominique, Lyons. 

yh November [1793]. 
My dear mother, of whom I have long heard nothing, if the 
misfortunes which have happened in our town have left you still 
alive, receive my last farewells. I am about to rejoin the un- 
fortunate victim of my sad fate, and to quit for ever this land of 
suffering. You have adopted my children. I again commend them 
to you. I wish them to join you, for they have no longer anybody 
on the face of the earth. Receive my best thanks for the assistance 
which you have kindly sent me. I carry gratitude with me to the 
tomb. When you read this I shall be no more. I shall no longer 
have to endure the ills of this painful life. Encourage and console 
my children. Alas, they lose a good mother. Replace me with 
them. I have seen our [female] cousin here. She sends them to 
you, or to your sister if you are no longer at Lyons. Love them ; 
they deserve to be loved. Let her never forget me, nor you and 
our dear children. Remember me to your dear eldest daughter. 
Thank her if she will adopt one of them. Divide them all three 
among you. Farewell. Receive the testimony of unbounded 
affection, which will end only with my sad existence. 

Gabriel Nicolas Francois Boisguyon, aged thirty-five,, 
1 A.F. ii. p. 286. 



404 PARIS IN 1789-94 

adjutant-general, admitted having gone to the Girondin 
gathering at Caen, but denied having offered to join the 
Girondin forces. He was tried and executed along with 
Girey-Dupr£, who on his way to the scaffold sang his own 
verses, afterwards styled the "Chant des Girondins," the 
refrain of which was, 



C'est le sort 



" Mourons pour la patrie, 
le plus beau, le plus digne d'envie. 



XXI 

To Citizen Fremont, Druggist, Chdteaudun. 

Conciergerie, 2 Frimaire, year 2. 
Citizen, I was yesterday at four in the afternoon condemned to 
death, and in two hours I shall be no more. I beg you to inform 
my mother, taking all the precautions necessary for rendering the 
news less overwhelming. Send some one to her gently to apprise 
her, so that she may not receive the information by letter, and may 
not have under her eyes a monument [sic] reminding her of my last 
moments. Assure her of all my affection, and of my hope that she 
may find in her virtues the consolation which she will need. [Some 
business directions follow.] Boisguyon. 

Claude Antoine Cappon-Chateauthierry, 71, brigadier- 
general, was convicted on the 23rd November 1793 of 
ineffectually urging his troops, on the 20th June 1792, to 
defend the Tuileries against the mob. 

XXII 

To Citoyenne Cappon, Paris. 

Sunday morning, 24th November. 
The law, my dear daughter, enters into possession of the little 
property which I possess, but you have rights as a creditor. . . . 
There remains to me great regret for having accepted army con- 
tracts. Forget an unfortunate father, who loved you and loved his 
country, and who has met death in wishing to serve it, through the 
atrocious calumny of some soldiers of the regiment which he 
commanded, who have prevailed against the certificate of all the 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 405 

regiment which contradicted them, as well as the witnesses. Care 
for thy health. Behold a last expression of attachment and ten- 
derness. 

In October 1793 a piece of water in the park of an 
ex-minister of finance, Jean Charles Clement Laverdy, 
aged 70, at Gambais, was found full of mud, containing a 
few grains of wheat. The mud was alleged to be decom- 
posed wheat, and Laverdy was accused of conspiring to 
produce a famine. He had been absent from the place for 
two or three weeks, and the piece of water was accessible 
to the public, while the grains of wheat had evidently 
been blown in by the wind. His wife, on his arrest, 
vainly demanded a chemical analysis of the mud. On the 
24th November 1793 Laverdy was condemned. He was 
asked by the judge what property he possessed, and he 
gave the particulars, the total being 1,400,000 francs. His 
wealth probably conduced to his sentence. A member of 
the Academy of Inscriptions, he was a good classical 
scholar, and the commissary who arrested him found him 
translating Horace. 

XXIII 

To Citoyenne Veuve Labuisse, Rue Guenegaud, 26, Paris. 

Adieu for ever, my beloved daughter, adieu my beloved wife, 
adieu for my other daughter, adieu for all my grandchildren. I die 
innocent and calumniated, but perfectly resigned to my fate. I 
have had no priest. God will supply the place of one. Pray for 
me, and I will pray for you. Preserve the memory of an unfortunate 
father, who was not culpable but unfortunate. 

4 Frimaire (24th November). 

Gabriel Wormestelle, aged 43, the writer of an ill-spelt 
but firmly written letter, was a member of the Gironde 
popular commission, which tried to resist the measures 
enforced on the Convention by the Paris mob. Having 
been consequently outlawed, he was executed without 
trial. His widow was still living in 1825. 



406 PARIS IN 1789-94 

XXIV 

To Citoyenne Wormestelle, Rue du Temple, No. 1, Bordeaux. 

12 Frimaire (2nd December) 1793. 

These are the last lines which my hand will trace. In a few 
hours I shall be no more. I am condemned to death. Well, wife 
whom I have always loved, I die still full of affection for thee. 
I do not bid thee to forget me. I know thy belle ame, thy 
affectionate heart. No, thou wilt never forget me. But live for 
our poor children. Remind them of me. Let me serve as their 
example. Let them be better than I. Rear them in the practice 
of virtue. My property is confiscated. It is so small that it will 
be no great loss for thee. Bring them up to like work. Transfer 
to them all the affection which thou hadst for me. Adieu, — a 
thousand times adieu. Spare thy tears, and think only of our 
children. Wormestelle. 

Etienne Pierre Gorneau, 20, clerk at the ministry of 
the Interior, was condemned on the 3rd December 1793 
for anti-revolutionary correspondence, viz. a letter in 
which he ridiculed two deputies for parading in their 
plumes and scarves. He had also copied a parody of the 
" Marseillaise." 

XXV 

To Citizen Gorneau, Cloitre St. Merri, 452, Paris. 

My dear papa and my dear parents, I offer you my last adieux. 
My sole regret on quitting life is to be unable to embrace you. I 
have no other tie. He who has never known crime, who has been 
kind, humane, feeling, and generous, dies with calmness. I hope 
that my labours have served to consolidate the Republic. I have 
constantly desired the welfare of my country. I have abhorred 
despotism and adored liberty. To-day I am the victim of an 
inconsistency, an imprudence committed at the age of twenty, and 
I die without fear. I hoped, in concert with my elder brother, to 
be the stay of the old age of dear parents who have brought us up 
with the greatest care, and shown the tenderest affection during our 
childhood. I am frustrated of this hope, but thou, true brother, 
sincere friend, be in my default the intrepid defender of the rights 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 407 

of humanity. Be careful to serve thy country. . . . Mamma must 
feel my loss greatly. Let her know that I am calm at meeting 
death. ... I go from a prison, which is a preparation for an 
eternal act. I was cooped up there with forty poor devils, all 
expecting the same fate. I do not know whether to believe pre- 
sentiments, but I dreamt several times of my affair [trial], which I 
expected when I found myself suddenly transferred to St. Pelagie. 
I wish my father to preserve this letter for his descendants, to 
remind them that I existed, and that I perished a victim to my 
opinions, the 14th Frimaire, 4th December 1793, old style, year 2 
of the French republic, between noon and one o'clockj on the 
Place de la Revolution. Once more adieu ad vitam csternam, 
father, mother, brothers, sister, uncles, aunts, kinsmen, cousins, 
who are dear to me, and whose acquaintance is more mischievous 
on account of the friendship which we have contracted. 

Antoine Pierre L6on Dufrene, aged 32, doctor, had 
recently arrived from St. Domingo. He wrote to his 
friends there that in exchanging that island, with its negro 
risings, for Paris, he had gone from Scylla to Charybdis, 
and in one letter he said, " It is impossible to say or write 
anything without risk of the guillotine." Again he said, 
" There would be many things to tell you of the present 
state of France, but I shall not venture on anything, and 
you will guess the reason. However nice the guillotine 
when you accommodate yourself to it, and whatever the 
courage thus far shown by the heroes of this Revolutionary 
invention, I have no mind to try it." But the unfortunate 
man had committed himself by these intercepted letters. 
The enclosure to Le Fourdray is the only farewell utter- 
ance resembling a malediction which I have met with. 



XXVI 

Receive, oh adorable spouse, the last wishes of thy poor hus- 
band. He was not so good as thou art. . . . Write to me once 
more, that I may carry to the tomb a line from thy chaste hand. 
I end. My tears water my letter. Calm thine. Send me 15 f. 
I have handed 60 f. to Jaline, which he will doubtless deliver 



408 PARIS IN 1789-94 

to thee. Thank him for me, as well as all my friends. ... I shall 
be at the Conciergerie till ten or eleven to-morrow morning. Adieu, 
adieu, adieu, and for ever adieu for eternity. — Thy husband, 

13 Frimaire. DUFRENE. 

[Enclosure.] 
To Citizen Le Fourdray, Commissary of Marine, Cherbourg. 

Receive, wretch, my eternal adieu. I do not know whether 
thou didst it purposely. Although I know that thou art a scoundrel, 
I cannot bring myself to think thee so malicious. All that I can 
say to thee is that the letters which I had confided to thee have 
conducted me to the scaffold. If it was through malice, thy turn 
will soon come. Adieu. Dufrene. 

13 Frimaire 1 793. 

Guillaume Leonard, omitted in M.' Wallon's Histoire 
du Tribunal Revolutionnaire, was a wineshop-keeper at 
Paris, condemned for uttering forged assignats. 

XXVII 

To Citoyenne Leonard, Wineseller, Paris. 

My dearest, I bid thee farewell with tears in my eyes. I am 
condemned to die to-morrow, and I die innocently, without having 
ever committed any crime. I forgive thee all that there has been 
of contention with thy parents, and I hope with confidence that 
thou wilt do the same. Write immediately to my parents, and 
inform them that I die for our country in the company of wretches, 1 
yet without having been criminal. I have not in all my life com- 
mitted any crime. I embrace thee with tears in my eyes, and shall 
be thy husband to my last hour. Thou knowest that I owe 5 f. 
to Citizen Maudit, who lent it me on the day of my arrest. Do 
not be ashamed to announce my death to my parents. I have 
known how to live, and I shall know how to die. Adieu, dearest, 
and for the last time I write to thee, and am, — Thy husband, 

Leonard. 

Paris, 19 Frimaire, year 2 of the French 
Republic, and Vive la Republique ! 

1 Six fraudulent army clothiers. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 409 

Charles Antoine Pinard, tailor, was executed as a frau- 
dulent army contractor. 

XXVIII 

To Citoyenne Prevost, Rue de POratoire, 141. 

19 Frimaire, year 2. 
My dearest, when thou receivest this letter thy bon ami will be 
no more. I should have preferred death in fighting for the defence 
of the country, but this has not been allowed me. I undergo my 
fate, and I carry to the tomb the tranquillity of a conscience without 
reproach. Be ever faithful, my dearest, to what thou hast promised 
me. Spare thyself for thy own sake, and for the infant whom thou 
bearest in thy bosom. Girl or boy, bring it up in the principles of 
the Republic. Be always prudent and virtuous, the same as thou 
hast ever been. Farewell : thy image is before my heart ; let mine 
be before thine. Never forget thy friend. Spare thyself, and tell 
thy son or daughter that its father died like a true Republican. 
Embrace my parents. I love them ever. Pinard. 

Antoine Demachy, grocer, and commissary of one of 
the Paris sections, was condemned 26 Frimaire, year 2, for 
complicity with fraudulent army contractors. 

XXIX 

To Citizen Demachy, Grocer, Rue St. Jacques, Paris. 

Brother, I write you this at the moment when I am about to end 
my days. I hope that my example may serve you as a guide in this 
Revolution. [Here he mentions two debts.] I embrace you, and 
wish you all possible happiness. Demachy. 

Jacques Serpaud, 56, barrister, and steward to the due 
de Montmorency, was condemned on the 15th December 
1793 for writing and sending money to the duke, whose 
cashier and concierge were likewise condemned. 

XXX 

To Citoyenne Serpaud. 

Thy poor father is about to die with all the courage of which he 
is capable. Pity, my dear daughter, his fate less than thine own. 



410 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Live happy, and take care that thou deservest to be so. I implore 
for thee the kindness of thy friends, whom I embrace for the last 
time. 

1 6th December 1793. My companions in misfortune offer thee 
their last adieux. 

Amable Augustin Clement, 33, watchmaker, Paris, was 
condemned on the 27th December 1793 for assisting as a 
national guard in the dispersion of the mob in the Champ 
de Mars, 17th July 1791. Struck by a stone, he had fired 
in the air. 



XXXI [No address.'] 

I have lived 32 years, 8 months, and 20 days. Behold the 
reward for serving my country since the 14th July 1789. I hope to 
undergo my trial with the firmness which I have always shown on 
all occasions since the Revolution, unless my strength fails me. I 
beg those who read this last melancholy writing to pity an unfor- 
tunate who dies for having obeyed, and that without knowing what 
he was doing. I declare my chiefs to be as innocent as myself, but 
it will be acknowledged too late that I did not deserve such a fate. 
One of the same battalion, a victim like me (his name is Barrois), 
accompanies me to the scaffold, but it is the theatre of honour when 
one dies for his country. 

Given the 27th December at 7.30 morning. Immortal in the 
heart of his friend (amie), it is not to cease to be when one dies for 
his country, and my last word shall be thy beloved name. 

That notorious roue, generally known as the due de 
Lauzun, though in 1788 he inherited his uncle's superior 
title of due de Biron, was condemned on New Year's Eve 
1793. His posthumous memoirs, although disavowed by 
the family, were genuine, having, it is said, been copied by 
a mistress of Artois (Charles X.), who had lent her the 
manuscript for twenty-four hours. Lauzun assisted in the 
war of American independence, but though an old courtier 
accepted the Republic, and served in the army in Vendee. 
He disliked, however, the Jacobin officers placed under 
him, and quarrelled with Rossignol. He was deprived of 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 411 

his command July 11, 1793, and put on trial, with ten wit- 
nesses against and four for him. The case not being con- 
cluded on the 9th Nivose, the court sat again on the 10th, 
though d^cadi was usually a dies non. On leaving for the 
scaffold he said to his fellow-prisoners, " I am starting 
on the long journey." He pressed a glass of wine on 
the executioner, saying, "You must need nerve in your 
business." Fouquier-Tinville, whose verdict must for once 
be accepted, described him as having " abjured his king, his 
class, and his religion." He had for many years been sepa- 
rated from his wife, Amelie de Boufflers, who was executed 
on the 26th June 1794, through a kind of mistake, for Fou- 
quier had intended only to slaughter the dowager duchesse 
de Biron, Lauzun's aunt by marriage, but being told there 
were two duchesses he ordered both to be tried. Accord- 
ingly the dowager, aged 71, and the junior duchess, aged 
48, were condemned together. In a farewell letter, not to 
his wife, but to his aged father, the due de Gontaut, who 
survived till 1800, to the age of 95, Lauzun, otherwise so 
despicable, shows a kindly interest in his dependents. 

XXXII 

To Citizen Gontaut. 

I am condemned. I shall die to-morrow in the sentiments of 
religion, of which my dear papa has set me the example, and which 
are worthy of him. My long agony derived much consolation from 
the certainty that my dear papa will not give way to grief of any 
kind. ... I have two Englishwomen who have been with me 
twenty years, and who have been detained as prisoners since the 
decree on foreigners. 1 I was their only resource. I commend them 
to the succour and extreme kindness of my dear papa, whom I love. 
I respect and embrace him for the last time with all my heart. 

Biron. 

On the 7th January 1794 Catherine Bedtinger, wife of 
La Violette, was condemned for dealings with the enemy. 

1 On the seizure of Toulon, all the English in France were arrested as 
hostages. 



412 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Her husband had been in business as a draper at Cour- 
trai, and had, like her, welcomed the French as liberators. 
When the latter evacuated Belgium in March 1793 she was 
advised to settle at Lille, and she took some of her property 
with her. Hearing that what remained behind was in jeo- 
pardy, she went back to recover it, taking with her letters 
of recommendation from a friend, Joseph Mandrillon, to 
the Duke of Brunswick and Prince Frederic of Prussia. 
On her return she was arrested, as also Mandrillon, and 
both were condemned. 



XXXIII 

To Citizen La Violette, Hotel Grange Bateliere, Parts. 

I have just been condemned to death, my children — you know 
my innocence. Nobody, it seems to me, has come [to demon- 
strate it]. You have sent to Danton, with your unfortunate father. 
Try to preserve the life of thy innocent mother. I shall spend the 
night in writing to you. Adieu, friends, to-morrow you will hear of 
me. I write this to you in order not to lose time, Be calm. I am 
so. My dear Angelique is acquitted. 1 Go to the National As- 
sembly. Say how innocent I am. 

Enclosed was an appeal to the Convention for a respite 
to give the opportunity of proving innocence. It said : — 

Separated for a year from my beloved family by the jealousy 
incited in my husband, I was groaning without complaint under 
injustice. The moment of my acquittal was to restore me to his 
arms. I impatiently awaited it. It is in the arms of death that we 
shall one day be united. . . . Restore an unhappy mother to her 
young family, who have need of her, and let my husband receive 
from your hands his wife, still worthy of his affection. You are 
husbands and fathers. Consult your own hearts. I am worthy of 
your solicitude. 

At Montpellier, on the arrest of the Girondin deputies 
at Paris, a committee of resistance was formed. It was 

1 Marie Madeleine Ferriere, wife of Rousse, tried as an accomplice. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 413 

headed by the mayor, Jean Jacques Durand, aged 33, an 
ex-judge, and it issued several manifestoes, signed by him. 
He vainly, prior to and at the trial, pleaded that he had 
been misled in siding with the Girondins; the disavowal 
did not save his head. 



XXXIV 

To Citoyenne Durand, Hotel de P Union, Paris. 

My dearest, do not grieve too much. I assure thee that I shall 
die content. The rigour of men ensures me the mercy of God. 
It expiates the faults that I have committed, and prevents those 
which I might have committed. Thou knowest my weakness of 
character and my extreme sensibility, which perhaps misled me. 
It is worthy of God's goodness to prevent this. We shall never be 
parted. I shall watch over you. When thinking of me know that 
I am there and that I love thee ever. I forgive my enemies. Do 
likewise. They fancied they were doing well, but it is I alone who 
am ruined. . . . God alone does good. It is He who separates us 
for a moment in order more surely to reunite us, and that for ever. 
Thou seest that it was necessary. Adieu, my beloved. Be con- 
soled for life by the prospect of eternity. It was a question of 
spending it together. There was no doubt about it except for me. 
Thank God, there is no longer any. Adieu, dearest. No, I do not 
bid thee adieu. I say " Good night," for I am going to sleep for a 
moment, a single moment, and on awaking I shall again see my 
beloved, and nothing will then be able to part us. I embrace our 
children, parents, and friends. As solace for my death I leave 
them my life. I leave it to them as an example. Let them learn 
by my fault to correct their failings, curb their passions, and not 
always act on impulse, which may mislead them. Let them love 
their country as I have loved it, and let them serve it more effec- 
tively. My children, love your mother, and obey her as you would 
obey both of us. I bequeath her all my rights over you. She has 
both her own and mine. My dear parents, I am sorry for the pain 
I cause you. Your grief is the only thing which I feel at this 
moment. Adieu; I am going whither the Master calls me. He 
takes me away from labour at midday. I shall rest till the evening, 
then it will be all the same. Adieu, my dearest, adieu. Thy 
husband, thy everlasting friend, Durand. 



414 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Jean Baptiste Louis Courtonnel, aged 36, innkeeper, 
was convicted of supplying inferior hay as an army con- 
tractor. He explained that a few trusses might inadver- 
tently have been of poor quality. 

XXXV 

To Citoyenne Courtonnel, Aubergiste, Beaumont le Roger, 

Eure. 

CONCIERGERIE, 7 Pluvidse. 

Receive, my dearest, my last adieux. I am about to die, full of 
affection for thee and our dear children. My enemies have suc- 
ceeded in getting me convicted. Thou knowest my innocence. 
Adieu for ever. I am full of regret at quitting thee, but I shall 
bear my fate with calmness up to the last moment. Embrace my 
children for me, and remind them of their father. Let them, 
cherish his memory, without being unreasonably affected by his 
death. . . . 

I recommend thee to do exactly all that I mentioned in my 
previous letter for thy good, and in order to extricate thyself from 
the enmity of those who have caused my death. 

J. B. Courtonnel. 

Jean Baptiste Emanuel Rouettiers, aged 45, had been 
a groom in waiting to Louis XVI. His widow and two 
married daughters were still living in 1825. 

XXXVI 

To Citoyenne Rouettiers, Marat's, Paris. 

I approach the fatal end, my dear wife and children. I clasp 
you affectionately to my heart, which still beats and will beat to the 
last breath for you. Ever love one another, all three. Be happy 
with one another, and do not forget thy husband and father, 

Rouettiers. 

12 Pluviose, 11.30. 

Anne Jeanne Rouettiers de la Chauvinerie, sister of the 
above, and wife of the marquis de Charras, aged 41, was 
condemned the same day for corresponding with Emigre 
relatives. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 415 

XXXVII 

To Citizen Charras and his Three Children, Asnieres. 

Adieu, my dear husband; my poor children, adieu. Receive 
the last embraces of your affectionate wife and mother. All that I 
will add is that my heart in everything is yours. I approach the 
fatal moment. Never forget me. I ask my poor children that 
these my last words be ever preserved by them. Adieu. I send 
you my last breath. I recommend you all to her who loves you, 
your aunt and sister. Adieu. Femme Charras. 

12 Pluviose. 

Guillaume Martin, a doctor, aged 65, was one of seven- 
teen inhabitants of Coulommiers, two of them women, 
condemned 15 Pluviose for "a conspiracy to make Seine- 
et-Marne a second Vendee," — that is to say, for support- 
ing the Girondins. The description of death as a long 
journey, used also by the due de Lauzun, was probably a 
reminiscence of Rabelais' reputed deathbed remark, "Grease 
my boots for a long journey." 

XXXVIII 

To Citoyenne Dufrene, Coulommiers. 

Adieu, my dearest. I am very sorry for the pain which I have 
caused thee. It must be hoped that this will last only for a time. 
I wish you every kind of happiness, as also my friend Dufrene, who 
will prove to you that he loved me by loving and respecting you, 
and conforming to your will. I am soon going to start on a long 
journey. My last breath but one will be for Dufrene and for you, 
and my last will be for my God, who, I hope, in His mercy will 
receive me, and in whom I put my trust. Adieu, all my friends and 
neighbours. Martin. 

Pray daily for me and for your father, if God allows me the 
grace of rejoining him in eternity. 

Etienne Francois Maulnoir, 50, justice of the peace, 
was another Coulommiers victim. 



4i 6 PARIS IN 1789-94 

XXXIX 

To Citoyenne Maulnoir, Paris. 

The die is cast, my beloved. I had for a week been expecting 
the blow which has now befallen me. I am separated from thee 
for eternity. I do not complain of my fate. I submit to it with 
resignation. . . . Adieu, my dear wife. I do not ask thee to 
remember me. I know thy feeling too well, and have no doubt 
on that point. 

Pierre Merlin, 29, lawyer, was convicted of participation 
in the same movement. 

XL 

To Citoyenne Merlin. 

All is over, my beloved. The sacrifice of my life is no great 
thing, but I am anxious to justify my memory. Busy thyself, 
therefore, with the revision of the judgment against me. . . . 
Embrace my sister. Remember me to her husband, my family, 
thine, and our friends, indeed to all interested in me. Do not be 
uneasy at my fate. I shall die a free man. Receive the last adieux 
of thy best friend. 

13 Pluvidse. 

Louis Nicolas Paillot, 44, ex-general at Troyes, farmer, 
was convicted on the 2nd February 1794 of a royalist 
conspiracy, viz. of signing a loyal address to the King 
after the 20th June 1792. 

XLI 

To His [Step?] Son. 

Give thy mother every possible attention, and love her. She 
deserves it. . . . Above all, cherish no hatred or resentment against 
anybody, for I repeat that no witness accused or scarcely mentioned 
me. . . . My greatest vexation is my inability to testify all the 
gratitude I feel for thy mother. Ask of her one favour, it is the 
last, viz. to preserve her health for the sake of her children, who 
have still need of her, especially my daughter. Adieu, my beloved 
friend, may thou be more fortunate than I. 

3rd February, morning. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 417 

Marie Gabrielle Chapt-Rastignac, 60, of Marly, widow 
of the marquis de Paysac, was condemned on the 5th 
February 1794 for correspondence with the enemy, viz. 
her emigre son and several other persons. She was 
probably sister of a priest who in the National Assembly 
had vigorously defended ecclesiastical property, and a 
collateral ancestor had at the beginning of the century 
been archbishop of Tours. 



XLII 

To Mademoiselle Paysac, 71 Rue de St. Pierre, Paris. 

My dear daughter, I am condemned to death. Be consoled. 
Thank my counsel. Take care, I beg you, of your health. Well, 
my child, sooner or later [death comes to all]. Remember me to 
the amiable [female] cousin and to all my friends. . . . Adieu ! I 
embrace you. I have asked that my hair may be given to you. 

Jacques Philippe Isaac Gueau de Reverseaux, 55, 
ex-intendant of Bourbonnais, but described as a farmer, 
was convicted on the 12th February 1794 of correspond- 
ence with the enemies of the republic and of talk against 
recruiting for the army. The son of an eminent jurist, he 
had at the outbreak of the Revolution retired to Chartres, 
hoping to escape persecution by writing no letters and 
receiving or paying no visits. But being in a hurry for 
the erection of a shed on his farm, he was told by the 
carpenter that most of his men had just been called out 
to join the army. He replied that they were not forced 
to go, for they could get substitutes. Some of the men, 
hearing or remembering only the first part of the sentence, 
told their municipality that Reverseaux had said they 
were not obliged to become soldiers. Thereupon he was 
arrested. He admitted, at the trial, having said that the 
monarchical constitution of 1791 could not work, and this, 
he added, had been verified. 

2 D 



4 i8 PARIS IN 1789-94 

XLIII 

To Citoyenne Gueau, Rue Neuve Notre Dame, Paris. 

25 PluviSse, 
I write to thee, my dear daughter, to thank thee for thy atten- 
tions and to stimulate thy courage. I have spent a quiet month. 
I beg thee to tell this to thy mother and to give her, on the essential 
hope of another life, all the consolation for which I myself hope. I 
have read several times chapter 19 of the 3rd book of the " Imitation " 
on which I chanced to open. Read it again and again to thy 
sisters for me. ... I was quite satisfied with my counsel. Tell 
his father so, and if you can render any service to that family I beg 
you to do so. . . . Thou wilt communicate this letter to thy mother 
when thou thinkest fit. It appeared to me that all the witnesses 
were vexed at what has happened to me and had no hatred towards 
me. . . . Adieu, my dear daughter, receive thy father's and best 
friend's wishes for thy happiness and that of the family. The past 
moments are painful and grievous, but the memory of those who 
have been dear to you creates in your mind a sweet feeling which 
is not without pleasure. I hope my wife and children will soon find 
themselves in this position. 



XLIV 

To Citizen Guyot. 

25 PluviSse. 

It is at the moment of death, citizen, that I write to assure you 
that I carry to the tomb no resentment against you or those who, I 
believe involuntarily, have brought me where I am. I beg you to 
say so to Jean Pataud and the others. I forgive with all my heart 
those who may have been my enemies. Not only do I forget all 
the unpleasant feelings which you may have conceived or manifested 
against me, but I am sincerely grateful to you for the way in which 
before the tribunal you rendered my wife the justice due to her. 
The public recognition of her virtues has left in my mind a satisfac- 
tion for which I thank you. — I am, your servant, 

Reverseaux. 

Jacques Henri Wiedenfeld, 27, banker in Paris, and a 
native of Aix-la-Chapelle, was condemned on the 14th 
February 1794 for exporting coin in chemists' gallipots. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 



419 



He pleaded that it was a commercial, not a political, affair. 
No witness was called. 



XLV 

To Citoyenne Van Houten, at the English Convent [Prison], 
Rue de POtirsine, Paris. 

My death is pronounced, and I shall die innocent. I love and 
have loved thee all my life, and shall love thee also until death. 
My last breath will be thine. Share my grief, but do not be 
afflicted. I quit the sound of human voices. Be happy ; thou 
deservest it. I greatly regret my inability to leave thee anything, 
but my means have never allowed me. My heart is eternally yours. 
Adieu, adieu, adorable woman, receive my last kiss. 

General Dortoman, 51, of Montpellier, arrested in 
October 1793, was convicted on the 23rd February 1794 
of having abandoned positions on the Italian frontier to 
the enemy. 

XLVI 

To Citizen Colombier, Montpellier. 

I have, citizen, just been condemned. I am about in a moment 
to ascend the scaffold. I do not pity myself, but my wife and 
children. The little property which I possess is confiscated by the 
republic. Let my wife take care to claim what is hers. I do not 
pity myself, but my wife and children. I commend them to you, 
and am persuaded that they will lack nothing, with thy kind heart. 
I die innocent. Thou hast long known my principles, and I have 
never altered. I am a victim of envy and mean jealousy. Thou 
wilt receive by post 1200 f. Dumas had lent me 800 f., which 
must be repaid to Clemens. Adieu, my dear citizen ; I do not 
regret life, but only my wife and children. Take care of them. 
Health, friendship, and fraternity for the last time. 

Etienne Thomas Maussion, 43, an ex-judge at Rouen, 
repelled a mob which tried to pillage his granary. He was 



4 20 PARIS IN 1789-94 

accused of visits to hnigris at Brussels and Rome, but this 
charge was refuted and abandoned. On the 24th February 
1794 he was declared guilty of hoarding grain. 

XLVII 
To Citoyenne d'Escayrac, Rue Richelieu, Paris. 

Conciergerie, 7 Ventose. 
I know, my dear niece, that you were hovering round the Palace 
[of Justice] yesterday. God is my witness that my sole uneasiness 
was lest you should be present at my condemnation. I know how 
your affectionate and susceptible heart must have suffered. Two 
points only were raised at the trial. First, the Bordier affair. You 
know what a stranger I was to it. The second was the alleged 
emigration. Nobody knows better than you that my return to 
France dates back two years before the extreme date fixed by the 
decrees. Nevertheless I do not complain of the condemnation. I 
adore the decrees of Providence, and I bless the hand which strikes 
me. I think I defended myself with simplicity, presence of mind, 
coolness, and courage. I should, however, have made a fuller 
defence if I had not behind me my counsel, on whom I counted. 
I do not know why, but he also cut it short. Let him be easy, 
however ; I have no grudge against him. I know that it was not in 
his power to save me. I am sorry that the witnesses who signed 
my certificate and who simply testified the truth were destroyed 
\sic\. Ready to appear before the tribunal of the Supreme Being, 
I testify it again and fear no contradiction. Having but little 
money in prison, I have been unable to pay what I owe to my 
counsel. It seems to me that the nation, which takes possession of 
my property, should undertake the debt. If this raised the slightest 
difficulty, my family are too honest not to discharge it. My children 
will not refuse to pay for these things out of the property which 
should come to them. I recommend you then to pay citizens 
Chauveau and La Fleutrie. I leave you my unfortunate children, 
and trust to your affection for lavishing cares on them. Let them 
be well educated. It is the best inheritance which can be left 
them. Inculcate betimes principles which may be their rule of 
conduct through life. Let the unfortunate example before their 
eyes early teach them the vanity of human things, so that they 
may attend to what is more certain and durable. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 421 

Five persons charged with giving Maussion a false 
certificate of residence were sentenced on the 28th April 
1794 to six hours' exposure in the pillory and six years' 
imprisonment. 

Pierre Jean Sourdille-Lavatelle, aged 30, barrister, was 
a prominent Girondin at Laval. The italics are mine. 

XLVIII 

To Citoyenne Sourdille Lavatelle, Laval, Mayenne. 

12 Ventdse. 
Adieu, kind and affectionate wife, and adieu for ever. It is two 
o'clock, and I hope at three to be on my way to the Place de la 
Revolution. You see, my dearest, that by four o'clock I shall be 
happier, or at least not so unhappy as thou. Thou art the only person 
who made me cling to life, and for some time I was afraid of having 
lost thee. Thy silence, unbroken since the 30 Pluviose, made me 
think that thou hadst succumbed to the innumerable blows which thou 
hast undergone for some time, and then my days were numbered. 
I defended myself with courage and firmness. I shall show this up 
to the last moment, and I shall leave, I hope, the name of an honest 
man. I have not written thee a longer letter, but I wish to converse 
a last time with thee. I swear to thee that under the fatal knife my 
thoughts will be fixed on thee. Live for my sons, my mother, my 
aunt. Bid my sister farewell, and receive the tenderest kisses. / 
have swallowed thy ring. It was bound never to quit me. Adieu, 
my dearest. I send thee a thousand kisses. Sourdille. 

Alexandre Pierre Cauchois, aged 28, architect, was 
condemned on the 12th March 1794 for saying that one 
tyrant, meaning a king, was better than five hundred, 
meaning the Convention. He was, however, a Republican. 
On ascending the scaffold he exclaimed, " Sons of the 
fatherland, you will avenge my death ! " But the specta- 
tors waved their hats and cried, "Vive la Republique ! " 

XLIX 
To Citoyenne Cauchois. 

All is over. For having honestly loved liberty and having been 
unable to keep silence in the presence of the wicked, I am sacrificed. 



422 PARIS IN 1789-94 

A putrid fever would have had the same effect. If any consciousness 
is retained after death, my feeling will be for you and for my country. 
In spite of their injustice towards me, I persist in thinking that men 
are stupid rather than wicked. I should have liked to lose my life 
in the cause of liberty, but I fear my death will merely cement the 
public slavery. I leave you more unfortunate than myself, and my 
only regret is to add to your misfortunes. Adieu. 

Cauchois. 

Martin Blanchet, aged 43, kept a wineshop. When 
a captain in the National Guard, in August 1792, it is 
alleged that he refused to join in the attack upon the 
Tuileries. His letter is ill written and ill spelt. It will be 
noticed that he addresses his wife as " widow." 



A la Citoyenne Veuve Blanchet, Marchande de Vins, 
Faubourg Poissonniere, 18, Paris. 

Adieu, my wife, my children, for ever and ever. Love them, I 
beg thee, my children. Tell them often what I was. Love them 
for both of us. Adieu, wife and children. I am about to draw the 
curtain of life. All you, my friends, comfort my wife and children. 
This is what I ask of you. Adieu Martre, adieu Galvan, and all 
who sympathise with my misfortune. Embrace my little children. 
I end my days to-day. Blanchet. 

Judged criminally, 23 Ventose, 1794. I embrace my wife and 
children. 

[On the outside page.] Adieu, Tripotin, my friend. Wife, 
adieu, and children, — adieu for life. Preserve the papers of my 
trial for my children. Adieu for ever. Blanchet. 

Francois Nicolas Du Biez, alias Dignancourt, a clerk to 
the Paris municipality, was condemned for uttering forged 
assignats, but he writes like an innocent man. 

LI 

My dear love and faithful wife, I take advantage of this moment 
when my courage does not abandon me, to repeat to thee my last 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 423 

farewell. Receive it with equal courage and affection. Embrace 
frequently thy dear child, who is also mine. Bring him up in true 
republican principles. It is the wish of the people, it is the wish 
of the sovereign [that is, people]. Remind him frequently that he 
had a father who dearly loved him, and tell him how much I loved 
him. Thou knowest it, dearest. Tell him that his unfortunate 
father had no cause for self-reproach, and that he dies with the 
tranquillity inspired by innocence. "The scaffold does not dis- 
honour, but only the crime." Tell my friend the captain that I die 
with all the esteem for him which he has inspired in me. Embrace 
thy mother for me, and tell her not to forget me. It is nine o'clock. 
I have perhaps still two hours to live. I shall employ them in 
thinking of thee. Adieu, dearest; adieu, my child; adieu to thy 
mother, whom I much esteem. Take courage, and do not give 
way to grief. I am thy dear and faithful husband, the unfortunate 

Du Biez. 

4 Germinal, nine o'clock in the morning, 
year 2 of the French Republic, one 
and indivisible. 

On the 24th March 1794, in the batch of eighteen 
persons, including Hebert (pere Duchene) and Cloots, 
executed for being more Jacobinical than Robespierre, 
was Antoine Francois Momoro, a native of Besancon, 
twenty-eight years of age. He is assuredly entitled to no 
pity, for his hands were stained with blood, and had he 
and his Cordeliers club triumphed the Terror would have 
become even more sanguinary ; but he could meet death 
with stoicism, for on a scrap of paper he writes thus : — 



LII 

To Citoyenne Momoro, Rue de la Harpe, No. 171. 

As a republican preserve thy character, thy courage. Thou 
knowest the purity of my patriotism. I shall maintain the same 
character till death. Bring up my son in republican principles. 
Thou canst not carry on the printing office. Dismiss the workmen. 
Greet citoyenne Marat and the republicans. I leave you my memory 
and my virtue. Marat has taught me to suffer. Thy husband, 

Momoro. 



424 PARIS IN 1789-94 

The intended recipient of this letter had figured as one 
of the Goddesses of Liberty in November 1793. 

Pierre Rougane Bellebat, of Dunkirk, aged 31, was 
condemned, together with his uncle, on the 25th March, 
for anti-revolutionary talk and for drinking the health 
of the King of Prussia. 

LIII 

To ClTOYENNE ROUGANE, Care of ClTIZEN ROUGANE-BELLEBAT 

Pere, Aigueperse. 

My dearest, when thou receivest my letter it will inform thee, 
alas, that thou hast no longer a husband. To-day, 4 Germinal, I 
have been condemned to death, but what consoles me is that I die 
innocent. I started without being able to bid thee a last farewell. 
Be consoled for my loss. Behold an example by which all our 
young men should profit. Behold thyself sole mistress. Take care 
of that poor unfortunate Julia. Let her be thy solace. Be consoled. 
I die innocent, and I have taken care to settle my affairs. I beg 
my father to pay my debts. Adieu, I embrace thee with all my 
heart, and am thy husband, Rougane. 1 

Claire Madeleine Lambertye de Villemain, aged 41, 
wife of a former secretary to the King, corresponded with 
her emigre brothers, and concealed the plate of the Polignac 
family, her kinsmen, to save it from confiscation. She 
denied having sent money to her brothers, or having 
known that some plate belonging to the due d'Artois (the 
future Charles X.) was with that of the Polignacs. She was 
condemned on the 27th March, 7 Germinal. 

LIV 

To ClTOYENNE LAMBERTYE. 

Weep not for your daughter, dear mamma. She dies worthy of 
you. She has loved you to her last breath. Live and take care of 
yourself and pray for me. Adieu. My last sighs are for you. 

Lambertye de Villlemain. 

1 Four other Rouganes, of the same family, were also guillotined. One of 
them, his brother Claude, seventy years of age, had been a priest at Clermont- 
Ferrand, had joined the hermits at Mont Valerian, near Paris, and had published 
numerous pamphlets on revolutionary legislation. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 425 

Jean Valery Hard, aged 30, of Alencon, a cotton manu- 
facturer, was accused of sending money to an emigre'. 

LV 
To My Wife. 

Conciergerie, 9 Germinal. 
My dearest, my last moments have come. I have been condemned 
to death by the Revolutionary tribunal. I am innocent of what I 
am accused of; but no matter, it is settled, and at least I die well, 
rest assured. Be consoled. This is the only happiness I can hope 
for during the brief moments remaining to me. My sister-in-law 
Houdouard, to whom this paper is addressed, will hand you my 
portrait, taken here. It is not very good, because I had to start for 
trial just when the painter was taking it. This testimony of my 
remembrance will be a sure guarantee to you of that affection which 
I have ever cherished for thee, and which will not end, but which 
I shall gladly carry away with me. Harel le Jeune. 

There are also a few lines to his sister, and to his sister- 
in-law and her husband, begging them to break the news 
to his wife and to be kind to her. 

Francois Charles Gattey, 30, bookseller, Palais Royal, 
Paris, was condemned on the 14th April 1794 for sending 
reactionary books to a customer in St. Domingo. His 
sister, Marie Claudine, aged 39, an ex-nun, was present at 
the trial, and on hearing him condemned, resolving not to 
survive him, shouted three times " Vive le roi." She was 
at once arrested, and tried and executed next day. 

LVI 

To Citoyenne Gattey. 

I die, dearest, with a pure and innocent heart. Nobody better 
than thou can have judged my sentiments. I commend my dear 
children to thee. They are young plants, which thou canst train 
according to the new laws. I know the purity of thy soul. If I 
have sometimes appeared to scold thee, forgive my hasty temper, 
and never forget that thou hast been loved and cherished. I need 
not commend thee to thy parents. They are as dear to me as my 



426 PARIS IN 1789-94 

own. Pity me with them. But why pity me ? I am innocent. The 
moment of death approaches. I am about to begin a journey, the 
thought of which should make despotic tyrants tremble. Allow me 
before starting to fling myself at thy feet and ask pardon for the 
offences which I may have committed and the vexations which I 
may have caused thee. Thy husband, courageous, emboldened by 
the purity of his intentions, is about to pay the tribute which he 
owes to Nature. If regrets cling to him, it is for not dying in thy 
arms, and for not being able to express at the last moment all that 
I have always felt for thee. Adieu ; forget thy beloved, so as to be 
happy. Thy children will one day be thy happiness. Embrace 
them tenderly, and constantly inculcate in them all the sentiments 
worthy of a true patriot. Death is nothing. I have never been a 
conspirator, and my denouncers will live only in shame. Adieu ; I 
embrace thee a last time, also my children, thy parents and mine, 
not forgetting my friends. [Written] on my knees. 

Gattey. 

Jean Claude Geant, aged 41, was a member of the 
administration of the Moselle, which, apprehensive of 
diplomatic difficulties with the prince of Nassau- Saarbriick, 
suspended the confiscation of an abbey belonging to him. 
For this act of disobedience he and ten colleagues were 
executed. 

LVII 

To Citoyenne Geant, Metz. 

My dear Amelisse, Human nature is nothing. Man appears for 
an instant, and his soul flies away to the bosom of his Creator. I 
go there to prepare thy place. Live for our dear children. I join 
my ancestors and thine. — Thy unfortunate husband, Geant. 

17 Flortal. 

Adieu, dear children. Be virtuous, love your country as your 
father did. I shall pray for all ; pray for me. Amen. 

Francois Collin, 54, farmer, ex-judge, and administrator 
of the department of Moselle, was condemned on the 6th 
May for a royalist protest against the invasion of the 
Tuileries. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 427 

LVIII 

To Citoyenne Collin, Ars-sur-Moselk. 

I start, my beloved, for the scaffold. I hope to demean myself 
as a free man. I intend to die fasting. Entreat my children to 
continue to serve their country, and to show in battle the same 
courage as their father. I embrace thee and citoyenne Canou. 

This was enclosed in the following letter to Fouquier- 
Tinville : — 

I beg thee, public prosecutor, to forward this letter to my wife, 
so that my sons, who are in the Carabinier corps, may receive my 
last orders to die for their country. 

Henri Jacques Poulet, 56, of Metz, an ex-judge, and 
procureur of Moselle, was condemned on the 6th May 
1794 for complicity in the same offence. 



LIX 

To Citoyenne Poulet. 

Adieu, my dear unfortunate wife. You will be my last thought. 
Submit to your fate, and be consoled as to that of your husband, 
which, however, he has not deserved. I forgive my fellow-citizens 
with all my heart. Respect the laws, as you have always seen 
me do. A woman's sphere is easier than a man's. Domestic 
life has always been thy liking, and it will suit you more than ever. 
I commend to my children the best of mothers and the most affec- 
tionate of wives. Adieu, for the last time, adieu. 

I thank you, my dear daughter, for your affectionate attentions. 
Thy filial love will be rewarded. Start immediately and return to 
Metz. Remember me to your mother, and give your sisters and my 
son the paternal blessing. Your father gives it to you from his 
heart. 

Jean Baptiste Buret, 33, farmer, of Vic-sur-Aubois, was 



428 PARIS IN 1789-94 

condemned on the 16th May 1794 for anti-revolutionary 
talk. He vainly asked for a respite. 1 

LX 

To The Public Safety Committee. 

Citizens, I have the honour to inform you that I have just been 
tried and sentenced to death. The wife of citizen Chauveau, my 
counsel, died yesterday. He has all my papers in defence, with the 
list of my witnesses. I have not been able to produce either. I 
ask for a respite. 

Conciergerie, 4 p.m., 27 Floreal. 

Delphin Legardeur, aged 52, cloth manufacturer at 
Sedan, was one of twenty-five municipal councillors and 
notables executed for resistance to the Jacobins. 

LXI 

To General Legardeur. 

I offer thee, my dear son, my last adieux. I commend thy 
mother to thee. Although the younger, I hope that thou wilt set a 
good example to thy brother, and that you will both continue to do 
your best to defend the Republic. Legardeur. 

15 Prairial, year 2. ' 

Charles Louis Victor de Broglie, aged 37, son of Mar- 
shal de Broglie, had been an army officer. He was a 
member and one of the presidents of the National Assembly. 
Protesting against the fall of the monarchy, he was de- 
prived of his military command, but eventually accepted 
the Republic, and returning to Paris joined the National 
Guard, till reinstated in the army. On the 30th March 
1794 his arrest was ordered. His being the son of an 

1 So also with the Polish princess Lubomirska, who, on being condemned, 
wrote to Fouquier to inform him that she had been confused with a cousin by 
marriage of the same name. Fouquier not only tossed this letter aside, but inter- 
cepted another, addressed to princess Amelia of Hohenzollern. Enclosing a lock 
of her hair, she wrote : " Adieu, Amelia, I shall soon cease to live. Remember 
thy friend, and love me in the person of my child." That child, only five years 
old, had been arrested along with her mother. See Stryianski, Deux Victimes 
de la Terreur. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 429 

emigre* was really his sole offence. This touching letter, 
written on a scrap of coarse paper, was addressed to his 
wife, then a prisoner at V^soul, for though in 1792, with 
her infant son, she had crossed over to England in an open 
boat, the passage taking fourteen hours, she had returned, 
to avoid being classed as an emigree, but was nevertheless 
imprisoned in Arras till the General Security Committee, on 
her husband's petition, peremptorily ordered her release. I 
had the satisfaction of acquainting the due de Broglie, the 
statesman and Academician, with the existence and where- 
abouts of this, his grandfather's last letter. One of the 
children spoken of married Madame de Stael's daughter. 

LXII 

To Citoyenne Broglie, Vesoul. 

Liberty. Equality. 

Conciergerie, 7 Messidor. 
I have been since yesterday at the Conciergerie, my dear Sophie. 
I am about to mount to the Revolutionary tribunal with the purity 
of conscience and calmness which inspire the courageous man. 
Whatever the result, it will be prompt. Bear it with firmness. 
Take care of thyself for our children, whom I load, like thee, with 
kisses, tears, and regrets. Never forget thy poor husband, 

Victor Broglie. 

Jean Jacques Joseph Mousnier, aged 38, a lawyer, 
was one of thirty-eight prisoners condemned for the 
pretended plot at the Luxembourg. His anxiety for his 
guillotine toilet is characteristic. 

LXIII 

To Citizen Royer, Painter, Rue Lfelvetius, 57. 

Conciergerie, 20 Messidor. 
Republic, one and indivisible. 

I am anxious, comrade, to thank thee for the kindness which 

thou hast lavished on me during my fatal detention, for I have only 

twenty-four hours left. To all appearances, I shall be guillotined 

to-morrow, though the most innocent man in the world. Send me 

a shirt, pocket handkerchief, and a pair of stockings. The rest of 



43Q PARIS IN 1789-94 

my wardrobe will be an instalment of what will be due to thee 
when the nation, my heir, relieves thee of the charge of my effects. 
Claim thine own at the Luxembourg. Adieu. My last compli- 
ments to thy wife and neighbours. Adieu for ever. 

Mousnier. 

Send me also the shabby coat which I lately sent thee with my 
overcoat. 

There will be fifty sous for the commissionaire who brings me 
the receipt. 

Francois Nicolas Louis Rouviere de Boisbarbeau, 61, 
ex-noble of Freville, Loiret, one of Louis XVI.'s secre- 
taries, was condemned on the 27th July 1794, the very day 
of Robespierre's fall. 

LXIV 

To Citizen Buller, Amiens. 

Paris, 20 Messidor. 
I am at the Conciergerie, citizen, consequently there remains for 
me only courage and the testimony of a good conscience. Try to 
apprise my mother and my poor friends, so that they may not learn 
from the newspapers that I am no more. Tell my mother that I 
die an honest man and in the Catholic religion in which I was 
born. . . . Father and son have both been your friends. 

Among the forty-six prisoners at the Carmelite monas- 
tery guillotined on the 23rd July on the pretence of a.plot, 
was the marquis Gouy d'Arcy. Born in 1753, with the 
Dauphin (Louis XVI.'s father) as his sponsor at baptism, he 
married in 1780 a rich Creole of St. Domingo. When, 
therefore, in 1789 the nobility of his own district of Melun 
refused to elect him to the States-General, on account, not 
so much of his being a freemason and a disciple of Mesmer 
as an admirer of Necker, he obtained election in St. 
Domingo, and as deputy made numerous speeches and 
published pamphlets, some in opposition to negro emancipa- 
tion, for his liberalism drew the line at the black man. He 
did not sit in the Legislative Assembly or in the Conven- 
tion, but remained in retirement at Arcy, which he had 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 431 

once to defend against pillage. Imprisoned for three days 
in Paris in April 1793, on the denunciation of Marat, he 
was again arrested on the 8th October and sent to the 
Carmelites, which he left only for the Conciergerie and the 
scaffold. During his imprisonment he wrote a pamphlet 
on political affairs, but twice over destroyed the manuscript 
on his cell being subject to search. On the 13th July 1794 
he commenced writing — but often interrupted by sobs — a 
farewell letter to his wife, for after the judicial massacre of 
the 150 Luxembourg prisoners he resigned himself to a 
similar fate. The letter is eight or ten thousand words in 
length, and it reached its destination, probably through a 
bribe to a turnkey. It is not, therefore, like the epistles 
already quoted or about to be quoted, an intercepted letter, 
nor is it even an unpublished one, for his widow printed it 
in 1795, but inasmuch as the pamphlet has never since 
been reprinted and is almost unknown, I give some pass- 
ages from it. Let me premise that Gouy d'Arcy had sep- 
tuagenarian parents living, as also a grandmother, and that 
he had four little children, one born during his imprison- 
ment and whom consequently he never saw. He deems it 
impossible that his soul can " exist in the Elysian fields " 
without still loving and being interested in his wife, and he 
assures her that he shall continue to watch over her, espe- 
cially at her deathbed, when he will " carry her soul to the 
bosom of God, where we shall be I hope for ever united." 
He exhorts her, inasmuch as his property would be con- 
fiscated, to bring up his sons to trades — printing, for 
instance, like Franklin, or surgery. He adds : — 



LXV 

I have always desired liberty, equality, the welfare of the people, 
and the prosperity of the nation. I adhere to these sentiments till 
death, and I forgive my punishment to those whom unfounded 
prejudices have doubtless blinded to my innocence. ... It would 
be painful for me to believe that thou shouldst think to honour my 
memory .by wearing, and making our children wear, external mourning, 



432 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the display of which might, as long as our storms are prolonged, 
be detrimental to thee. I require my beloved, therefore, to avoid 
all that could create the slightest suspicion in this respect. A 
regret from her, a recollection, a phrase daily to my children, a tear 
from time to time in her eye, will be more glorious for thy husband 
than all those sombre rags lasting for a year. . . . Thy heart may 
be in mourning, but let not thy person be so. 1 . . . What now 
remains for me to do ? Ah, beloved, the most painful act, it remains 
for me to quit thee. Here I confess, to the shame of human 
weakness but to the pride of my heart, all my physical strength 
abandons me, my moral faculties are annihilated, tears flood my 
face, and I am so overcome as to seem to have ceased to be before 
having suffered death. To leave my family, to be parted for ever 
from my beloved companion, to be removed for ever from my dear 
children, to retain all my intellect for appreciating what I lose, all 
my heart for knowing what I quit, all my senses for struggling 
against the mortal blow which is about to sever me from the living 
— all this, my dearest, overcomes me and kills me beforehand. Ah ! 
where shall I find strength for undertaking such a journey ? No 
friends, no consolers, isolated from all that love me, I see around 
me only the prison, the judges, and the executioner ; but my con- 
science sustains me, my innocence consoles me, piety comforts me, 
and God summons me ; it is in His paternal bosom that I am about 
to cast myself. . . . Your hair, which I have fastened to my body, 
will not even be separated from it by the mortal blow. It will 
mingle with the dust of my sad remains, and when my soul is 
already free, one of thy tresses will still clasp me. Keep my por- 
trait, my lock of hair, some articles of furniture of which I was fond, 
and especially this letter. I conjure thee to read it through three 
times a year, on the anniversaries of our marriage, my arrest, and my 
death. ... I enclose . . . my hair, which I have myself cut off, 
for I will not have it reach thee sullied by the hand of Robespierre's 
executioner. . . . O my country, my country, mayst thou speedily 
be delivered from the sanguinary executioners who seek to dishonour 
thee in the face of all nations. 

Thus ends this, the longest and by far the most striking 
and harrowing of these farewell letters. And to think that 
had the trial been five days later Gouy would have been 
saved ! 

1 It was thus unsafe for victims' families to go into mourning. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 433 

Here is a letter without signature, address, or date : — 

LXVI 

Adieu, my friend. I already cherish the other life. I am about 
to draw the curtain of this world. I do not march thither, I fly. 
To-morrow you will see my name in the newspapers. There I shall 
be a conspirator. Adieu for ever. The judgment which you have 
passed on me is most beneficent. To the citizens of La Chapelle 
and Bel Air, adieu, all my friends. 

It is consoling to find one farewell letter which was not 
followed by the death of the writer. The fall of Robespierre 
happily averted the trial of a father who on the previous 
day, ignorant of what was coming, thus addressed his 
son : — 

LXVII 

To Citizen Rivery, Battalion of Volwiteers, Freberville, 
Seine-Infirieure. 

Equality. Liberty. 

8 Tkermidor. 

Dear son, thou findest enclosed my accusation, to which there 

lacks only the reality of facts. I have never been an emigre, and 

have at all times combated aristocracy and royalty. It is a very 

vexatious accident to have come to Paris, where distrust is universal. 

Be nevertheless a good republican, and if my head can consolidate 

the indivisibility of the Republic, I shall readily make the sacrifice. 

Let me, in conclusion, give a farewell letter addressed 
not by, but to a victim of the Terror. General Adam 
Philippe de Custine, who had served in America with 
Lafayette, had welcomed the Revolution, and had won 
battles for it across the Rhine, was arrested on account 
of the loss of Mayence on the 22nd July 1793, was 
removed on the 30th to the Conciergerie, and on the 
17th August was brought to trial. On the 27th he was 
condemned, and on the following morning guillotined. 
His son's wife, Louise M61anie Delphine de Sabran, 

2 E 



434 PARIS IN 1789-94 

wrote to implore him to die as a good Catholic, but 
she did not know that he had already resolved on doing 
so. He received absolution from the abbe Lothringer, 
the Conciergerie chaplain, who, though a " constitutional " 
priest, and therefore in the eyes of Rome a schismatic, 
was still a priest, and entitled even according to the most 
rigid Roman orthodoxy to administer the sacraments. 
Marie Antoinette clearly did not understand this, or 
she would not have refused Lothringer's services. On 
receiving sentence, Custine, who was fifty-two years of 
age, knelt for two hours in prayer, asked his confessor 
to spend the night with him, and wrote a letter to his 
son, whom he exhorted to demonstrate his innocence of 
treason. Next morning the jailor handed him an unsealed 
letter from his daughter-in-law, but he declined to read 
it, lest it should unnerve him. Lothringer sat beside 
him in the cart on the way to execution, reading prayers 
and offering him a crucifix to kiss. Custine cast a com- 
passionate and tearful look on the howling mob, or 
raised his eyes to heaven. 1 So pious an end incensed 
the Jacobins, who immediately arrested both the daughter- 
in-law and the priest. The latter was liberated on the 
3rd September 1793, but Delphine was incarcerated till 
October 1794. In the previous January her husband had 
been guillotined. 



LXVIII 

When you receive this letter, father, the fatal moment which 
must end a life so dear to your children will have nearly arrived. 
My heart is torn by the imperative duty which my [pregnant] 
condition imposes on me not to fly to you. I should long ago 
have been with you but for this absolute impossibility, but 
especially on this last occasion I should have wished to give you 
a final proof of affection. I am not uneasy as to your courage, 
or the magnanimity which you will be able to display, but, 
father, in the name of all that is most sacred I ask you on 

1 Helen Williams was probably misinformed in stating that like Madame 
Dubarry he showed terror on reaching the guillotine. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 435 

my knees, and as the sole proof of your affection, to consider 
that the soul is immortal, that there is a God, an Eternity. If 
men have weaknesses, or passions which lead them astray, there 
are in the merits of Jesus Christ the sources of infinite mercy. 
I know that you have never despised religion. Do not neglect, 
then, the service which it offers you and the blessings which it 
promises you. All is about to end for time, even your daughter's 
affection you will no longer be able to enjoy. Alas that I have 
not had the pain of bidding you at this moment a last farewell. 
Profit by the blessings of religion, which are refused to none. 
Do not fancy that it is enough to honour God in the heart. 
Do, father, what I should myself do in the hour of death. 
Remember that the only idea which can mitigate the profound 
grief of your children is the hope of one day seeing you in 
heaven. I cast myself at your feet. I ask your blessing for me 
and for my children. My husband wishes me to express his 
grief and affection. Oh, father, I do not bid you farewell. I 
shall see you again in the abode of eternal bliss. 

Styled by her step-father, Chevalier de BoufHers, the 
u Queen of Roses," Madame de Custine, at twenty-three 
years of age a widow, ten years afterwards succeeded 
Madame de Beaumont in the volatile affections of Chateau- 
briand. Deserted by but still loving him, she showed a 
visitor, towards the close of her life, the room in which 
she used to receive him. "Then it was here," said the 
lady, " that he w T as at your knees." u I was perhaps 
rather at his," was the reply. This lively, impulsive, and 
cultured woman died in 1826. It was at her dinner- 
table that Gall, the phrenologist, took Chateaubriand for a 
simpleton, and was not a little disconcerted on discovering 
his blunder. 

One word, in conclusion, on Fouquier. He was ac- 
cused in the indictment against him of actually showing a 
fiendish pleasure in the multitude of the victims, and it 
was proved that looking once from his window into the 
courtyard and seeing two prisoners take an affecting 
farewell of two persons just condemned, he ordered 
them to a cell and had them tried and condemned next 
day. They had, however, already been brought from 



436 PARIS IN 1789-94 , 

the Luxembourg to the Conciergerie, and in any case 
would probably have been tried. His allegation was 
that these sympathisers might have handed knives to the 
condemned, and thus enabled them to commit suicide. 

With all his cynical brutality, he seems to have been a 
boon companion. Madame Wolff, whose husband was 
registrar to the tribunal, writes to him on the 15th Decem- 
ber 1793, begging him " to eat her soup, and above all not 
to refuse it, for she does not like refusals." l Gohier, a 
member of the Convention, on the 21st December invites 
him to dinner, his wife being anxious to make his acquaint- 
ance. Santerre, the brewer-general, in asking for the 
speedy trial or liberation of two generals, states that he is 
dining at 4 or 4.30 with some Montagnards at the hotel 
des Petites Ecuries, and adds, " If thou couldst manage to 
join us the festival would be complete." This shows us 
what was then the dinner-hour. 

Apart from bloodthirsty tyrants, no man perhaps equals 
Fouquier in wanton barbarity, yet strange to say he was not 
wholly devoid of feelings of humanity. He is believed 
to have protected the wife and daughters of the fugitive 
marquis de Miranion in Auvergne, because formerly, when 
a youth intended for the priesthood, they had taken kindly 
notice of him. 2 He appears, moreover, to have shown 
compassion towards the '•' Verdun virgins," tried on the 
24th April 1794, for offering sweetmeats to the King of 
Prussia. 3 On the 15th April two Mesdemoiselles Vatrins, 
who had come up to Paris to intercede for their three 
sisters, solicited Fouquier for an interview. This they 
probably obtained, for Fouquier, on interrogating the 
prisoners, tried to induce the younger ones to throw all the 
responsibility on their elders, but they heroically rejected 
this chance of escape, and the three Vatrins were guillo- 
tined. Claire Tabouiller and Barbe Henry, however, being 
just under sixteen years of age, were sentenced only to the 
pillory and twenty years' imprisonment. On the 13th May 

1 W. 170. 2 Serres, Revolution en Auvergne, v. 17. 

8 See my "Glimpses of the French Revolution," 235-244. 



PRISON DOCUMENTS 437 

they wrote to Fouquier, described themselves as more 
unfortunate than culpable, and appealed to his " kind 
heart " for permission to return to Verdun, there to undergo 
their sentence. They were willing to go at their own 
expense, for the work of their hands would enable them 
to repay any money advanced for travelling expenses. 
Fouquier must have assented, for on the 22nd May they 
wrote, effusively thanking him for his kindness. 1 They 
were ready to go by the first available conveyance. They 
possessed three or four thousand francs (in paper money). 
If this was not enough certain friends in Paris would 
advance the rest. Annexed to this letter is a coach time- 
table showing the fare to be 82 francs per head. On the 
8th June they wrote again, beseeching Fouquier that there 
might be no further delay, and he seems to have arranged 
for their journey, for on the 18th June, having reached 
their destination, they said : — 

Allow us, citizen, to repeat our deep gratitude for the kindness 
which you have shown us in our unfortunate position. Our lot 
through your kind heart has been mitigated. The consolation 
of rejoining our families was the only one which we ventured 
to hope for. We have great cause to be thankful for the polite- 
ness with which our gendarmes 2 treated us. We owe you addi- 
tional thanks for having chosen them. We hope, citizen, from what 
you have done, that if circumstances render it necessary we may 
apply to you with all the confidence which you inspire in us. Our 
effects have been catalogued. We do not know whether there is 
still an intention of selling them. 3 If we experience any difficulty 
allow us to have recourse to you. We are, citizen, with the most 
perfect gratitude, greeting, and fraternity, 

Claire Tabouiller, 
Barbe Henry. 4 

Thus Fouquier, otherwise so heartless, was open to 
compassion for children. He may even have heaved a 

1 W. 131. 2 They were still prisoners, and were taken to Verdun prison. 

3 The property of all condemned persons was confiscated. 

4 To the copies of these letters in U. 1019 is appended a memorandum of 
1 82 1, which states that Claire was then dead, but Barbe, wife of a military sous- 
intendant, was living at Metz and had four children. 



438 PARIS IN 1789-94 

sigh over these touching letters. He was apparently an 
affectionate kinsman and father. 1 A letter addressed to 
him by a cousin at St. Quentin 2 shows that he interested 
himself in the health of a sick aunt, and his ten-year-old 
son, on hearing him condemned to death, exclaimed to the 
judges, "Wretches, restore me my father." The poor boy 
had to be removed from the court. Fouquier's first wife, 
it is true, does not seem to have been happy with him, 
and when in 1782, four months after her death, he married 
again, three of the four children were adopted by their 
mother's family ; but his last letter to his second wife is not 
devoid of the pathos pervading the farewells of his victims. 
He says : — 

I shall die then, hands and heart pure, for having served my 
country with too much zeal and activity, and for having conformed 
to the wishes of the Government. But, my dearest, what will 
become of thee and my poor children? You are about to be a 
prey to the horrors of the most fearful poverty. . . . Such are the 
gloomy ideas which torment me day and night. ... I beg thee 
not to give way to grief, but to preserve thy health for thyself and 
our poor children. Forget the little disputes which we may have 
had. They have been the effect of my hot temper ; my heart had 
nothing to do with them, but has constantly been attached to thee. 
. . . Tears in my eyes, and my heart in anguish, I bid thee adieu 
for the last time, and thy aunt and our poor children. Alas ! what 
a sweet satisfaction should I not experience in being able to see 
thee again and clasp thee in my arms ! But, my dearest, it is all 
over, and must not be thought of. . . . Embrace our children and 
thy aunt for me; be a mother to my children, whom I exhort to 
be good and to obey thee. Adieu, adieu ; thy faithful husband till 
his last breath. 3 

Fouquier's widow died in poverty in 1827. 4 

1 The sanguinary Chaumette, moreover, applied for a week's leave of absence 
to take his sick mother back to the country. 

2 W. 151. 

3 Published by M. Lenotre in the Temps, Jan. 8, 1902. 

4 Baudot, Notes sur la Convention. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 

Duplay Household — Habits — Last Speech — Insurrection of Commune — 
Captured — Guillotined — His Notebook — Character 

Dislike him as we may, and must, Robespierre is neverthe- 
less the central figure of the second stage of the Revolution, 
just as Mirabeau is the central figure of the first, and when he 
disappears, the Revolution loses its chief interest. Despite 
his sallow complexion, the convulsive movements of his 
hands, shoulders, and neck, his green spectacles, his foppish 
attire, his shrill voice (but latterly modulated), his averted 
gaze, his hollow rhetoric, he escapes ridicule by horror. 
" One thing alone," as Renan says, 1 " does not admit of 
laughter — the atrocious. You may laugh at savants, poets, 
philosophers, religionists, politicians, plebeians, rich bour- 
geois. You will never laugh at - Nero or Robespierre." 
Everything relating to him is accordingly of interest, and 
there is no lack of materials. The references to him in the 
Moniteur alone would fill a book, for, with the single ex- 
ception of Barere, who was virtually his echo, he occupies 
much more space in the index to that journal than any 
other man. Hamel published in 1867 a minute biography 
of him, but new light has since been thrown on his Paris 
home by M. Lenotre, 2 and I have found in the National 
Archives some details of his tragical end correcting or 
supplementing those hitherto related. We have, therefore, 
abundant data for depicting his manner of life and the 
closing scene of horror. The picture may not materially 
modify the popular conception of him, but it will give us 
a more complete portrait. 

On Sunday the 17th July 1791 there had been an 

1 Avenir de la Science, p. 440. 2 Paris Revolutionnaire, 1895. 



440 PARIS IN 1789-94 

affray between the National Guard and the mob on the 
Champ de Mars, where a petition was being signed for the 
deposition of Louis XVI., who, three weeks before, had 
been brought back from Varennes. The Jacobin club sat 
till 11 o'clock at night anxiously discussing this untoward 
event, and, on leaving it, Robespierre was pressed by a 
fellow-member, Maurice Duplay, to pass the night at his 
house, a few steps off, 366 (now 398) rue St. Honore, in 
case a warrant should have been issued for his arrest, as 
for that of other Republicans. The invitation was accepted. 1 
Next morning he was urged to remain as one of the family. 2 
He had for nearly two years been sharing a room on the 
ground-floor at 20 rue Saintonge, a mile to the eastward, 
with Pierre Villiers, who copied his speeches for him, and 
he had taken his meals at a restaurant. The prospect of 
recovering those home comforts to which his sister Char- 
lotte had accustomed him at Arras, till his election as a 
Deputy in 1789, naturally tempted him, especially as he 
would be close to the Jacobin club. Sending for his few 
belongings, he accordingly remained, almost without inter- 
mission, at Duplay's for the remaining three years of his life. 

1 This is the most probable version, but Barras states that Robespierre asked 
Lecointre to recommend some lodging close by, and that Lecointre sent him to 
Duplay's. Charlotte Robespierre's version is that her brother was returning from 
the Champ de Mars, amid the cheers of the populace, when Duplay came out 
of his house, invited him to enter and rest, then prevailed on him to stay to 
dinner, and ultimately to pass the night. But Charlotte was not in Paris at the 
time. The crowd, fleeing panic-struck from the Champ de Mars, could have 
been in no mood for cheering, and Robespierre had probably not gone thither. 
Allowance, too, must be made for the free handling of the materials of Charlotte's 
memoirs by Lapommeraye. It is commonly stated that Madame Roland and 
her husband went that night to Robespierre's lodgings in the Marais to offer 
him a refuge with them at the Hotel Britannique, rue Guenegaud, but Hamel 
questions this intended offer, inasmuch as Madame Roland, after some hesitation, 
on account of the landlord being a Royalist, sheltered that night Robert and 
his wife. It is clear,! therefore, that she had had no idea of receiving guests. 
Her visit took place in all probability on the following day, for she says, 
"Robespierre had quitted his domicile." Had she gone on the 17th the landlord 
could not have told her this, but would merely have stated that he had not yet 
come in. 

2 Duplay may have been in want of a lodger, or liked to have celebrities under 
his roof, for the list of the Jacobin club shows that Dom Gerle, the Carthusian 
member of the National Assembly, lodged with him in 1789-90. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 441 

His host, fifty-two years of age, a native of St. Didier, 
Haute Loire, had come up as a young man to Paris to 
be a carpenter or builder, and patronised by Madame 
Geoffrin, whose literary salon was so famous, had prospered 
so as to be able to retire on 50,000 francs a year, derived 
from three houses, probably erected by him, in the rues 
Luxembourg (now Cambon), l'Arcade, and Angouleme 
(now La Boetie). The Revolution, however, driving away 
the wealthy class, had left these houses empty, and this 
had obliged him to resume business. He had occupied 
since 1779 one of the houses constructed by the Con- 
ceptionist nuns, along the frontage of their garden, beyond 
which was their convent, where his four daughters had 
been educated. Monastic property having been confis- 
cated, Duplay's premises now belonged to the State. 
There was a building level with the street, sub-let to a 
tradesman, with an archway and tiny court. Entering the 
archway, you found on the left, or west, a wing, the 
ground-floor and lean-to serving as workshops, while on 
the first floor were several rooms, reached by a door and 
staircase from the court. At right angles with this wing, 
at the extremity of the court, was a building containing 
the dwelling and sleeping rooms of the Duplay family. 
Invited to choose his quarters, Robespierre selected a 
small bedroom and dressing room (to serve as a study) 
in the west wing, the windows looking out on the lean-to 
below and on the court, but perhaps commanding an 
oblique view of the convent garden, in which birds and 
grasshoppers were lively in the evening, when the car- 
penters had left. These were probably the only vacant 
rooms, for Jacques Duplay, a boy of twelve, lodged in the 
west wing, as likewise, though probably not till later on, 
his cousin, Simon Duplay, a youth of fifteen, who had lost 
a leg at the battle of Valmy, and was frequently to serve 
as Robespierre's amanuensis. 

Duplay and his family had from the first been enthusi- 
astic for the Revolution, for on the 4th February 1790, 
when, King and Deputies having sworn fidelity to the 



442 PARIS IN 1789-94 

future Constitution, the people in the galleries followed: 
suit, he, his wife, son, and nephew were among them. The 
wife, whose maiden name was Frangoise Eleanore Vaugeois, 
was four years older than her husband. There were 
four daughters. The eldest was Eleanor, who had assumed 
or received the fancy name of Cornelia. The second was- 
Sophia, who in 1791 had married Auzat, a barrister in 
Auvergne. The third, Victoria, did not marry. The 
youngest, Elisabeth, born in 1773, married on the 26th 
August 1793 Philippe Lebas, a member of the Conven- 
tion. They had made each other's acquaintance through 
Robespierre's sister Charlotte, who then, with the younger 
brother, Augustin, also lodged with Duplay, and who took 
Elisabeth with her to the gallery of the Convention, where 
Lebas asked Charlotte who her companion was. It was a. 
case on both sides of love at first sight. Madame Duplay 
demurred, indeed, to her youngest daughter being married 
before her elder sisters, but Robespierre's recommendation 
of the young man was irresistible. 1 The youngest of the 
family was a son, Jacques Maurice. The entire family had 
unbounded admiration for Robespierre. Eleanor seems 
to have loved him, but whether he intended to marry her 
is by no means certain. 2 It is not easy to imagine him in 
love with anybody but himself. She had no personal 
attractions, for a portrait of her which was in the pos- 
session of Hamel shows coarse features and thick lips. 
After his death she certainly regarded herself as a kind of 
widow. 3 Charlotte Robespierre describes the mother as 
very designing. She even alleges that Robespierre advised 
his brother Augustin to marry Eleanor, but the handsome 

1 A narrative by Madame Lebas, first published in the Nouvelle Revue, 
1st November 1900, corrects several inaccuracies as to the Duplay household. 

2 Madame Lebas states, indeed, that they were betrothed, but her recollec- 
tions were written late in life. 

3 Madame Hemery professes to give reminiscences of Eleanor as a fellow art 
student under Regnault at the Louvre ; but if one of the Duplays was really 
there, it was probably Victoria. In any case her stories of the guillotine carts 
passing under the studio windows, of the Goddess of Reason being personated by 
one of the students, and of Mile. Duplay being ironically nicknamed Madame: 
Robespierre and supposed to be secretly married to him, are palpable fictions. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 443 

young fellow of twenty-seven had no inclination for a girl 
decidedly plain. Charlotte, however, is not an impartial 
authority, for she became so jealous of the Duplays' 
attentions to Maximilian, and of their having apparently 
supplanted her in his affections, that she persuaded him 
to remove with her to lodgings in the adjoining rue St. 
Florentin, where she could resume her old duties as his 
housekeeper. But Robespierre had a slight illness, and 
Madame Duplay, going to inquire for him, and perhaps 
struck by the discomfort of the lodgings, induced him to 
return to No. 366. Augustin remained with Charlotte, 
except when absent from Paris on missions, but Charlotte's 
position was an unenviable one. Becoming almost a 
stranger to Maximilian, she quarrelled with Augustin,. 
probably for not siding with her. On the 6th July 1793 
she wrote a touching and reproachful letter to him, from 
which it appears that both brothers were anxious for her 
return to Arras, especially as she had poured forth her 
troubles to outsiders. 

This letter was apparently sent on to Maximilian, 
accompanied by a letter in which Augustin declared that 
she had not a drop of blood in common with them, and he 
described her as their greatest enemy, calumniating them 
as unnatural brothers and threatening a scandal. 1 Her 
letter was preserved by Maximilian, for it was found 
among his papers, and was published by Courtois as 
though addressed to him. Good taste would of course 
have dictated a veil being drawn over family bickerings, 
and honesty required that the letter, if published at all,, 
should have been given as addressed to Augustin ; but 
neither honesty nor good taste could be expected from 
Courtois. Poor Charlotte, thus "boycotted," as we should 
now say, by one brother and censured by the other, must 
have been very unhappy ; yet in April 1794 she accom- 
panied Augustin to Nice, where she is alleged to have 
styled herself " madame " in lieu of " citoyenne," and to 
have associated with aristocrats. 2 She took umbrage, 

1 Rapport de Courtois. 2 Moniteur, xxi. 353. 



444 PARIS IN 1789-94 

however, at Augustin's intrigue with Madame Ricord, his 
colleague's wife, whereupon he sent her back to Paris. 
There she is said to have attempted a reconciliation with 
Maximilian, by sending him two pots of jam, but Madame 
Duplay returned them, saying that she would not allow 
Robespierre to be poisoned. She then, in May 1794, went 
by his advice to Arras, the sanguinary Lebon escorting 
her, and thence to Lille, but shortly before Thermidor, 
distrusting Lebon, she returned to Paris, to lodge with a 
friend, Madame Laporte, 1 in a quarter distant from the 
Duplays. 

With the exception of this short interlude, and of a brief 
visit to his native Arras, Robespierre never quitted Duplay's 
house. The younger children looked up to him as an elder 
brother, who interceded when their mother scolded them, 
and this was evidently in Madame Lebas' mind when in 
1845 she told the youthful Sardou, the future dramatist — 
" I could have loved him, he was so kind and affectionate to 
young people, and gave them such good advice." Danton, 
with his disdain for female society, gave Eleanor the nick- 
name of Cornelie Copeau — Cornelia Shavings — and he 
described Robespierre as surrounded by simpletons and 
gossips. Robespierre was certainly idolised in a way cal- 
culated to foster his love of adulation. La Reveilliere 
Lepanx, in the summer of 1792, was invited by Duplay to 
spend a day with him at his house in the Champs Elysees, 
for, not finding a tenant, Duplay seems to have used that 
house as a suburban retreat. Robespierre and Potion were 
present. La Reveilliere Lepaux afterwards called on 
Duplay in the rue St. Honore. He found Robespierre in 
the salon, in a large armchair, at a table loaded with the 
finest fruits, fresh butter, pure milk, and fragrant coffee. 
He was treated like a divinity. Father, mother, and chil- 
dren were all eager to guess and anticipate his wishes. In 
the adjoining room, the door of which stood open, was his 
bust, encircled with ornaments, verses, and mottoes, and 
in the salon were portraits of him. He himself was well 

1 Lenotre, Vieilles Maisons, 1900. 



MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE 




THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 445: 

combed and powdered, and wore a dressing-gown. Accord- 
ing to Esquiros, who derived his information from Elisabeth,, 
he did not dine out more than half-a-dozen times during 
the three years he spent in this household. He was very 
fastidious as to cleanliness, especially in dress, and although 
wigs and powder were beginning to be renounced by the 
revolutionists, he had every morning a hairdresser — latterly 
a royalist living at some little distance, that there might be 
no fear of being bored by gossip or worried by solicitations 
— to make him presentable. After this ceremony he dined. 
The afternoon he spent at the Hotel de Ville when he was 
public prosecutor for Paris. At six o'clock he returned 
for supper, as it was then called, and he was remarkably 
abstemious except that he was fond of oranges and pre- 
served fruits. Oranges he took as a corrective to bilious- 
ness, according to Freron, who also states that at one time 
he drank freely, but that he was latterly a water-drinker 
from fear of speaking unguardedly. 1 Freron would 
naturally impute sinister motives. In the evening, if the 
club was not sitting, he walked with the Duplays in the 
Champs Elysees, accompanied by his dog Brount. He 
liked to see Savoyard boys dance, and gave them money 
to divert him. He then sat and talked with the family till 
nine, when he retired to his study to write letters or 
prepare speeches, and this often lasted till daybreak. On 
Thursday evenings Madame Duplay received visitors, and 
Robespierre read or recited passages from Racine or Cor- 
neille, Voltaire or Rousseau. Rousseau, indeed, was his 
revered master, whom he was proud to have once seen, 
" I contemplated," he says, " thy august features, and there 
saw the traces of the bitter vexations to which the injustice 
of men had doomed thee ; thenceforth I comprehended all 
the joys of a noble life devoted to the worship of truth. 
. . . Like thee I would fain purchase this blessing (the 
consciousness of well-doing and the gratitude of nations) 
at the price of a laborious life, at the price even of a 
premature death." One can hardly fancy Robespierre 

1 Autographs, Collection Filon. 



446 PARIS IN 1789-94 

condescending to laugh or even smile, and his speeches 
may be searched in vain for the parenthesis on rit, yet 
in his time he had written sentimental or frivolous verses. 
Buonarotti, the future accomplice of the anarchist Babeuf, 
would play at these receptions on the piano, and Lebas 
on the violin. The company dispersed at eleven. 

This description plainly applies to the early period of 
Robespierre's stay, before he had ceased to be an opponent 
of capital punishment, before the Convention and its 
committees absorbed his time, before he had imbrued his 
hands in blood, and before Duplay served on the Revolu- 
tionary Tribunal. We are invited, indeed, by Hamel to 
believe that Robespierre only once asked his host what had 
been done by that infamous body, and that he received the 
reply, " I never ask you what has been done by the Public 
Safety Committee," whereupon Robespierre, accepting the 
rebuke, clasped Duplay's hand. Duplay, however, could 
not have made a mystery of proceedings which were daily 
reported in the newspapers, whereas the Public Safety 
Committee deliberated in secret. If these literary and 
musical evenings went on when forty lives a day were 
being sacrificed at the guillotine, it would argue shocking 
■callousness ; I prefer to believe that they had been dis- 
continued. The story of Robespierre having the blinds of 
Duplay's house drawn down on the day of Danton's execu- 
tion is not authenticated. It would imply that the blinds 
were not drawn down when other victims passed through 
the rue St. Honore. It would appear, moreover, from the 
plan of the premises that Duplay's front door alone com- 
manded a view, only momentary, of what passed along the 
street. 

Strict watch was latterly kept over Robespierre's safety, 
for he was believed to be in constant danger of assassina- 
tion. One of the Duplay daughters is said to have been on 
guard even during the hairdresser's operations. Barras, in 
the Memoires published in 1895, tells us how in the spring 
of 1794, going with Freron to call on Robespierre, he passed 
through the archway and the court lined with planks of 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 447 

wood, and saw Eleanor hanging out to dry the Dictator's 
ribbed-silk stockings, procured by him from Lyons, how 
her mother, seated in the court, was preparing a salad. 
Both mother and daughter would have stopped the 
visitors, but FreYon, knowing the way, began climbing 
the stairs, when Eleanor, brushing past him, opened the 
door and announced the arrivals. All this reads naturally 
enough, but some discount must be taken from the rest 
•of the description, for Barras represents Robespierre as 
engaged in his toilette, scraping the powder from his face, 
brushing his teeth, spitting on the floor or rather on the 
visitors' boots, neither offering them seats nor answering a 
syllable to their obsequious greetings. 1 

We have seen that Robespierre was in danger of arrest as 

a republican in June 1791. Was he afterwards a monarchist ? 

Certain it is that from May to August 1792 he published 

.a weekly newspaper entitled Le Defenseur de la Constitution, 

that is to say, of the Constitution accepted by the King in 

September 1791. In the first number he acknowledges, 

indeed, that he had criticised the work while in progress, 

but he now wished it to be carried out, and he attacked 

the Girondins for not accepting it. " The majority of the 

nation," he said, " wish to repose under the auspices of 

the new Constitution in the bosom of liberty." " It is the 

■Constitution which I wish to defend, the Constitution as 

it is." In the eleventh number he advocated a Convention, 

for which the existing Deputies, after the precedent of 1791, 

were to declare themselves ineligible. Both royal and 

legislative powers were to be restricted, the latter by a 

.frequent or periodical referendum. In his twelfth and last 

number, however, he applauded the overthrow of royalty 

on the 10th August. Harmand de la Meuse, a member 

of the Convention, alleges that between the 20th June 

1 Barras and Freron had reasons for dreading and defaming Robespierre, for 
ihe knew that in a letter to the Public Safety Committee of the 1st December 
1793 they represented the recapture of Toulon as impossible, recommending the 
^raising of the siege and the retirement of the troops behind the Durance till the 
:spring. This letter, indeed, was ostensibly treated as a forgery, but according to 
.M. Chuquet {Cosmopolis, February 1897), this was a comedy to screen them. 



448 PARIS IN 1789-94 

and the 10th August 1792 Robespierre was in treaty 
with the Court, through the Princesse de Lamballe. He 
was nominally to be tutor to the Dauphin, but while 
receiving the pay he was not to perform any duties, but 
was in a newspaper and at the Jacobin club to defend 
royalty. He was to resign the public prosecutorship to 
which he had been elected in June 1791. The King, 
after some demur, had agreed to thus buying over an 
enemy, but the Queen would not listen to it, and the 
King gave way to her. Thereupon Robespierre, thinking 
he had been duped, went over to the republicans. 1 

This story of the incorruptible Robespierre offering 
himself to the Court seems at first sight incredible, but he 
was actually a candidate for the tutorship of the Dauphin, 
and he really till the 10th August defended monarchy. He 
may have had the idea of being a second Mirabeau, the 
secret adviser of the Court, and of arresting the Revolution 
in its tempestuous course. He may, too, like Mirabeau, 
have fancied that in receiving Court pay he would be 
rendering service not only to the King, but to the nation. 2 
However this may be, he was blind in not foreseeing that 
the invasion of the Tuileries on the 20th June was the re- 
hearsal of a more serious attack, and that the days of the 
monarchy were numbered. His sudden evolution and the 
discontinuance of his paper may be attributed, not as 
Harmand represents to a rupture of the negotiations, but 
to the downfall of royalty on the 10th August. The result 
of that downfall was the calling of the Convention, and 
Robespierre set about getting himself elected to it. He 
was a member of the usurping or irregularly chosen Paris 
Commune of the 10th August, and was shortly afterwards 
elected a member of the tribunal for trying the " criminals " 

1 Anecdotes de la Revolution. 

2 Mirabeau's sister, curiously enough, was, or professed to be, one of Robes- 
pierre's admirers. In a fulsome letter to him of the 19th April 1794 (Rapiers de 
Robespierre, 2nd edition), she described herself as constantly attending the Con- 
vention and the Jacobin club, and as anxious to serve the Public Safety Committee 
by teaching reading, writing, and music gratuitously. She apparently wished to 
be paid not by the parents, but by the Committee. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 449 

who had on that day defended the Tuileries ; but as he 
could not hold both functions he declined the latter post. 
For the Convention he had two strings to his bow — his 
native department of Pas de Calais and Paris — and both 
constituencies elected him. Indeed he procured the elec- 
tion also in both of his brother. In Paris, he had himself 
been chosen vice-president of the electoral assembly (Collot 
d'Herbois was president), and he was the first of the twenty- 
four deputies elected, polling 338 votes out of 525. Petion, 
his competitor, mustered but 136. This was a thinly at- 
tended meeting, for next day Danton was returned by 
638 votes out of 700. Augustin Robespierre was only 
the nineteenth on the list, receiving 392 votes out of 
700. 1 In the Pas de Calais, Maximilian was also the first 
deputy elected, receiving 412 votes out of 724, but he 
"opted" for Paris. 

As a member of the Convention we must no longer 
picture Robespierre as spending agreeable evenings at 
Duplay's. The Convention usually met at 11, adjourned 
for dinner at 4, 5, or 6, and when there were evening 
sittings, reassembled at 8 and sat till 11 or 12; but from 
April, 1794, it sat from 11 till 3, 4, or 5, dispensing with 
night sittings. Robespierre was certainly a regular at- 
tendant, and he was president from August 23 to Septem- 
ber 6, 1793, and again from the 5th to the 18th June 1794. 
There were also committee meetings, and the Jacobin club 
met every alternate night. Robespierre can scarcely have 
taken more than his first meal at Duplay's. No dining- 
room was provided, indeed, at the Tuileries for deputies, 
there being only a refreshment stall, open also to the public, 
and they went or sent out to restaurants. Thus Lepel- 
letier, when stabbed on the 10th January 1793, was dining 
at a Palais Royal restaurant. In any case, Robespierre 
could have had but little time to spend with his hosts. 

Passing over Robespierre's movements till the summer 
of 1794, for to narrate these would be to give the history of 
the Convention, the first question to be settled is how far 

1 C. 180. 

2 F 



450 PARIS IN 1789-94 

he was responsible for the wholesale butcheries of the 
Terror. His absence from the Convention and from the 
Public Safety Committee has enabled his champions to 
deny such responsibility. Now he certainly absented him- 
self for the last six weeks of his life from the Convention. 
This was one of the allegations of his enemies, 1 and they 
could have had no interest in inventing a statement which, 
if untrue, could have been contradicted not only by the 
deputies, but by the frequenters of the galleries. 

As to the committee we have his own testimony. il For 
more than six weeks," he said in his speech in the Con- 
vention on the 8th Thermidor — and it is curious to find 
him speaking of " weeks " instead of " decades " — " the 
nature and strength of calumny, and inability to do good 
and prevent evil, have forced me entirely to abandon my 
functions of member of the Public Safety Committee. . . . 
Behold for at least six weeks my [alleged] dictatorship has 
ceased. I have no sort of influence in the government. 
Has patriotism been better protected, or have factions been 
better repressed ? Has the country been happier ? " 2 

Billaud and Barere at the same sitting, and Tallien on 
the following day, commented on this forty days' absence 
from the committee. 3 Robespierre, as we have seen, does 
not plead illness as the reason. He had been unwell, 
indeed, in February 1794, for on the 17th of that month 
the young republicans of Place Vendome section sent to 
inquire for him, and on the 26th, 27th, and 1st March 
deputations from the Temple and lie St. Louis sections 
likewise went to inquire. A list of attendances, from the 
20th January to the 18th June, at the Public Safety Com- 
mittee 4 indicates non-attendance, however, only from the 
9th to the 12th March. The committee's register repre- 
sents that he did not miss a single meeting between the 
8th and the 26th July 1794. Yet Barere states that he 
was expressly summoned to the committee on the 4th 
Thermidor (July 22), which implies that he had been 

1 Roux, Report of nth Thermidor. 2 Prods- Verbatix de la Convention. 

3 Moniteur, xxi, 530. 4 A.F. ii. 23, fol. 186. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 451 

absent, and that he then attended, denouncing various 
members both of that and of the General Security Com- 
mittee. The probable explanation is that any member of 
the committee transacting business at the Tuileries or 
Louvre was entered as present at the meeting of that day, 
and Robespierre, during his absence from the meetings, 
was evidently busy at the General Police Bureau on the 
third or top story of the Louvre, where on the 25th June, 
by a decree signed by himself alone, he had stationed a 
gendarme at the door with instructions to keep out all 
intruders. We know that the Public Safety Committee 
apportioned the work among its twelve members. There 
were thus four or five sections or sub-committees, but 
every decision ostensibly emanated from the entire com- 
mittee, and bore at least two signatures. Robespierre at 
first assigned himself to the education section, but after- 
wards, with St. Just and Couthon, formed the general 
police sub-committee, which received denunciations from 
the Paris sections, and gave directions to Fouquier-Tinville 
as to what prisoners were to be brought to trial. 1 St. Just 
was away from Paris much of the time on missions to the 
armies ; Couthon, as is well known, was a cripple, and 
Robespierre practically did everything. He continued to 
correspond, moreover, with the deputies and other persons 
sent on provincial missions, and only seven days before 
his fall he wrote a long letter to general Pichegru on the 
impending invasion of Holland, in which he foreshadowed 
the transplantation of the Dutch into France, and the 
abandonment of their country to the ocean. 2 In short, 
he continued to hold in his hand all the threads of govern- 
ment, and Benjamin Vaughan, M.P. for Colne, addressed 
to him from Geneva on the 14th July a letter on foreign 
policy as though he were a veritable dictator. 

According to the statement of Carnot (Minutes of the- 

1 See pamphlet by Augustin Lejeune, reprinted by Begis in Curiosity 
Rivolutionnaires. 

2 The authenticity of this letter, however, is contested. Vaughan, who sym- 
pathised with the Revolution, and had fled from England for fear of prosecution* 
was absurdly represented by Barere as an emissary of Pitt. 



452 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Convention, 3 Germinal, an iii.), Robespierre and St. Just 
took charge of general police ; Collot d'Herbois and Billaud 
de Varenne corresponded with the deputies sent on missions ; 
Barere attended to foreign affairs, and also in the absence 
of Jeanbon St. Andr6 to the navy. Carnot alleges that the 
main responsibility for any decree rests with the man first 
signing it, but even if this is the rule, there are notable 
exceptions. The order for the arrest of Danton had 
eighteen signatures ; Robespierre's was the seventeenth, 
yet the arrest was undoubtedly his act. Cambon, we know, 
attended to finance ; and Herault de Sechelles had been 
guillotined. 

According to St. Just's partially delivered last speech, 
Couthon was generally absent, Pierre Louis Prieur (de la 
Marne) had been eight months absent in the provinces 
(he was, in fact, absent in Thermidor), Claude Prieur (de 
la Cote d'Or) shut himself up in his office, absorbed in 
the manufacture of gunpowder, Lindet was also buried 
in his office (he was often, moreover, away on missions), 
and Jeanbon St. Andre was in the provinces. The com- 
mittee, said St. Just, had thus been in the hands of two or 
three members, and he argues that six signatures should be 
henceforth required for any decree. This statement may be 
accepted as substantially accurate, and it helps us to under- 
stand how the business of the committee was transacted in 
sections, the so-called sittings being almost a pure form. 

There was friction, moreover, between the Public Safety 
and the General Security Committees, whose functions 
were not clearly separated, and Vadier, on behalf of the 
latter, had brought ridicule on Robespierre by his report 
on the insane prophesyings of Catherine Th6os. Although 
he only twice attended the committee — once to justify his 
order for the arrest of the Place Royale section (ultra- 
revolutionary) committee, and the second time when ex- 
pressly summoned — he sent down to the committee from 
his upper room reports received by him, and these he 
annotated with such remarks as " arrest the persons here 
named," or " refer to St. Just that he may bring the traitor 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 453 

to justice." He is said, moreover, to have gone to the 
committee room at five in the afternoon, when he knew 
nobody was there, and signed what decrees he chose 
among those lying on the table. In this way his signature 
appears in decrees of the 5th, 6th, 7th, 16th, 19th, and 26th 
Messidor, and of the 2nd and 7th Thermidor. Indeed, in 
his speech of the 8th Thermidor he stated that in the 
temporary absence of a colleague (St. Just) he took charge 
of the General Police Bureau, and signed thirty decrees, 
some for arrests, some for liberations. These decrees, 
though emanating from Robespierre alone, bore the 
name of the Public Safety Committee. One of them, 
dated the 22nd June 1794, converted into a prison the 
College des Quatre Nations (the present Institute). Now 
if Robespierre, from his upper room at the Louvre, 
directed Fouquier-Tinville, his responsibility for the judicial 
massacres is manifest. In Messidor (June 19 to July 18) 
there were 796 victims, and from the 6th to the 9th 
Thermidor there were 342, whereas in Prairial there had 
been only 509. Thus during Robespierre's absence from 
the committee, and his upper-room labours, the average 
daily executions, allowing for the Decadi rest, numbered 
thirty-one. But even if we assume that he did not im- 
mediately direct Fouquier-Tinville during this period as 
previously — a note in his own handwriting on the 3rd 
Germinal summons Fouquier to confer with the Public 
Safety Committee 1 — the responsibility reverts to the com- 
mittee, on which St. Just and Couthon, his confidants, 
continued to act. These two men certainly did not utter 
a word of remonstrance against this bloodshed, nor did 
Robespierre in his last speech make the bloodshed a matter 
of reproach against the committee. Fouquier's defence, 
when charged with being the tool of Robespierre, was that 
he himself never went to the General Police Bureau, and 
did not even know in what room it sat, but that the orders 
for prosecutions were received by him in the committee's 
room, and were headed " Extracts from the Registers of 

1 w. 76. 



454' PARIS IN 1789-94 

the Public Safety Committee." Fouquier's veracity when 
defending himself is not worth much, but it seems likely 
enough that Robespierre, always fond of keeping in the 
background, 1 really avoided seeing his tool, and sent his 
orders in this indirect way. Prieur asserts, however, that 
he had frequent conferences with the judges of the re- 
volutionary tribunal. 2 In any case, contemporaries were 
right in holding him mainly responsible for the executions. 
The theory of his champions that he intended to stop the 
bloodshed is utterly unfounded. His very last utterances 
breathed threatenings and slaughter. 

Before relating his fall a word should be said of his two 
colleagues. Like Robespierre, St. Just was unmarried, and 
no father of a family would have proposed, as he did, that 
children should be taken from their parents and be entirely 
brought up by the State. He plagiarised, no doubt un- 
consciously, from Swift, also a celibate, who describes 
parents as being considered in Lilliput peculiarly unfitted 
for the charge of their offspring. Or he may have read 
Philipon de la Madeleine's Vues Patriotiques sur F Education 
du Peuple, which proposed that the State, to secure a race 
equal to the old Persians, Germans, and Gauls, should 
bring up all the children of the working-class from six to 
twelve years of age. The Journal General, reviewing this 
treatise on the 19th February 1784, said: — "This national 
education is only a project, but it will certainly be realised 
one day by nations other than the Persians." The youngest 
of the " Terrorists," for he was only twenty-seven, whereas 
Chaumette was thirty-one, Danton thirty-five, Robespierre 
thirty-six, and Couthon thirty-eight, 3 St. Just may be called 
the Terrorist thinker, for any originality in ideas was con- 
fined to him. He had a gift of terse, epigrammatic phrases, 
and he was doomed to exemplify one of them — " the rest of 
revolutionists is in the tomb." Danton's philosophy, whether 

1 He furnished notes to St. Just for his mendacious accusations against 
Danton. 

2 Me" moires de Car not. 

3 Vadier was the only elderly man on the two committees ; he was 58. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 455 

or not he uttered the phrase, was " It is now our turn for 
riotous living." As for Robespierre, he was simply a disciple 
of Rousseau. Yet St. Just's scheme of mutual fault-finding 
was obviously borrowed from the monastic orders which 
he had helped to suppress. The Perfectionists of Oneida 
Creek adopted the same plan, and it is curious to find 
Anti-Catholic theorists thus imitating Catholics. Amid the 
general unsainting of names of persons and places, St. Just, 
though dropping the de to which he was entitled, retained 
the obnoxious prefix, and the name seems to have been 
pronounced by his contemporaries " St. Ju." " Ju " by itself 
would therefore have too ludicrously suggested the word 
jus, gravy. He consequently remains one of the examples 
of names going by contraries. He was certainly neither 
saint nor just, and Lebon and Rossignol answered as little 
to their names. Going up to Paris in September 1792 to 
take his seat in the Convention, he hired, for seventy-two 
francs a month, two rooms on the second floor in the 
hotel des Etats-Unis, rue Gaillon. There he remained till 
the 16th March 1794, when he removed to the rue Cau- 
martin. On the 10th Thermidor, the day of his execution, 
the landlady of the rue Gaillon went to the Bibliotheque 
section to represent that 748 francs were due to her for 
rent, postage, and sundries. St. Just had left with her a 
blue coat and a basket of papers. These papers the land- 
lady brought with her, and they were sent to the Public 
Safety Committee. 1 If her story was true, St. Just had 
thus left about ten months' arrears of rent. Had she 
been afraid to press for payment, lest he should have her 
arrested as a suspect ? However this may be, the Archives 
contain a large number of letters addressed to him as a 
member of the committee. 2 Some of them, published by 
Courtois, were perhaps found in the basket, while there is 
a second batch of papers all in disorder and devoid of 
interest. 3 

Georges Couthon, who had dubbed himself Aristides, 
though far inferior to St. Just in mental capacity, is perhaps 

1 A.F. ii. 30. " A.F. ii. 30. 3 T. 1666. 



456 PARIS IN 1789-94 

more popularly known, on account of his being paralysed 
and of his fondness for a lapdog. An advocate at Cler- 
mont, he had about 1788, perhaps at an earlier date, fallen 
into a swamp in a nocturnal expedition of gallantry, and 
had nearly lost the use of his legs. He was elected to the 
Convention out of sympathy for his infirmity. He was 
subject to fits of pain, until the atrophy in his limbs was 
far advanced. He had to be carried in a chair to the 
Convention from the cour de Manege, close by the 
Tuileries, a building attached to the royal riding-school, 
whence he ordered on the 8th Thermidor the expulsion 
in twenty-four hours of all his co-tenants. 1 Whether he 
used or could have used crutches is uncertain. The well- 
known legend, however, is that when on the 9th Thermidor 
Freron denounced the triumvirs as conspiring to mount 
the throne, he held up his crutches and exclaimed, " / to 
mount a throne ! " 2 His supposed amiability had conduced 
to his election. He habitually had a lapdog on his knees, 
and he professed to have never hurt even a chicken, yet 
later on he is accused of boasting that he would see the 
Girondins beheaded without averted gaze. 

What would have been the fate of these two men had 
Robespierre triumphed it is useless to conjecture. Some 
think that St. Just would have overthrown Robespierre. 
What is certain is that neither St. Just nor Couthon proved 
of much service in the crisis. 

But to revert to Robespierre. His six weeks' absence 
from the committee was ominous. It unmistakably fore- 
shadowed an appeal either to the Convention, or, as some 
apprehended, to the mob. He was accordingly summoned 
to attend on the 22nd July, and was forced, as it were, 
to show his cards. He had spoken at the Jacobin club, 
on the 1st July, of conspiracies against him among his 
colleagues, and had said, " If I were forced to renounce a 
portion of the functions entrusted to me, there would still 

1 Moniteur, ii. 366. 

2 Another and more probable version is that, charged with conspiring, he 
pointed to his legs and asked, "How should /conspire?" 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 457 

remain my capacity of representative of the people, and I 
should carry on war to the death against tyrants and 
conspirators." * At the joint-committee meeting on the 
22nd he indulged in vague reproaches, and St. Just, who 
advocated a kind of dictatorship, yet without naming 
Robespierre, was commissioned to draw up a report on 
the state of public opinion. " Govern France," he said, 
"by patriotic reputations," but according to another version 
he distinctly named Robespierre, and, according to Barere, 
he proposed the doubling of the revolutionary tribunal, 
that is to say, four courts instead of two, in order to 
expedite the trials. 

Robespierre then commenced preparing the two hours' 
speech which he delivered in the Convention on the 8th 
Thermidor (26th July). It advocated the remodelling of 
the General Security Committee, its subordination to the 
Public Safety Committee, and some changes in the com- 
position of the latter. His enemies printed the speech 
after his fall — numerous erasures included — and there is 
no reason to question the fidelity of the text. It is all in 
Robespierre's usual vein — full of self-laudation, vague com- 
plaints, and denunciations. Even St. Just, in his speech 
next day, acknowledged that it was too vague as to those 
whom it inculpated, and that Robespierre had not ex- 
plained himself with sufficient clearness. 

Every history of the Revolution describes the scene 
which followed its delivery. Lecointre proposed that the 
speech should be printed and circulated — the compliment 
usually paid to elaborate written addresses. Bourdon 
objected on account of the gravity of its tenour, and 
advocated its reference, as was customary, to the two com- 
mittees ; but Barere supported the motion, and Couthon 
proposed that a copy should be sent to every parish in 
France. This was agreed to, but Vadier and Cambon then 
repelled Robespierre's attacks, Cambon even denouncing 
him as having " paralysed the Convention " in its financial 
management. Robespierre, in a few sentences, justified 

1 Moniteur, xxi. 131. 



458 PARIS IN 1789-94 

his attack on Cambon, but Billaud de Varenne reopened 
the question of printing the speech, and Panis called upon 
Robespierre to say whether he and Couthon had not drawn 
up a list of proscripts in which figured Fouche and him- 
self. Robespierre made an evasive reply. Charlier insisted 
on the reference of the speech to the committees, but 
Robespierre objected that this would be a reference to the 
very men whom he had accused. " Name them," retorted 
Charlier, and several voices echoed the cry, but Robespierre 
again evaded the challenge. Thirion and Br6ard then 
proposed the rescinding of the vote, and this was agreed 
to. The speech was to be printed indeed, but only for 
distribution among the deputies. Robespierre was accord- 
ingly asked for his manuscript, but he told the secretary he 
would hand it in next day. He meant, in fact, first to 
read it again at the Jacobin club, to which, more than 
to the Convention, it was really addressed. Barere then 
read reports of victories, accompanied with his usual 
rhetoric, and the sitting ended at five o'clock. 

In the evening Robespierre went to the Jacobin club. 
Vivier presided. We know little of what passed, except 
from the vague complaints of the minority. Collot seems 
to have been refused priority. Robespierre read his speech 
over again. Nothing but blind adulation could have pre- 
vented the clubbists from feeling bored by this two hours' 
infliction, and we may be sure that Robespierre omitted 
nothing in his interminable manuscript. When he said 
"■ If I am to dissemble these truths let the hemlock be 
offered me," x the painter David exclaimed, " I will drink it 
with thee," and this was noisily echoed by the meeting. 
Augustin denounced the committees as corrupt, and 
Dumas, a judge of the revolutionary tribunal, advocated 
the " purging " of the Convention. Billaud and Collot 
were refused a hearing. The former, hustled and threatened, 

1 In a passage expunged he had thus varied the phrase : " Let them prepare 
the hemlock for me, I will await it on these sacred seats. I shall at least leave 
my country an example of constant love for it, and to the enemies of mankind 
opprobrium and death." 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 459 

hastened to the Tuileries, where meanwhile the Public 
Safety Committee was sitting. . St. Just was there present, 
and announced that he should speak in the Convention 
next day, but promised before the committee separated at 
5 A.M. to submit his speech to it at 10. The committee 
accordingly assembled at that hour, but waited in vain for 
St. Just, and there was an altercation between Carnot and 
Couthon. 

The Convention likewise met at 10. The galleries, in 
the expectation of a crisis, had been crowded since 5. 
The entire Duplay family were there. The father had 
doubtless been at the Jacobins overnight, and Robespierre 
is said to have told him that though he could no longer 
count on the Mountain the mass of the Convention would 
listen to him. The two Robespierres were escorted from 
Duplay's by a volunteer bodyguard. Maximilian, more 
carefully curled and powdered than usual, wore the dark 
violet coat and nankeen breeches in which seven weeks 
before he had appeared at the festival of the Supreme 
Being. It was now nonidi, the 9th Thermidor, year 2, 
that is to say Sunday, the 27th July 1794. It was a 
cloudy day, but not sultry ; indeed, with the exception 
of the 23rd, it was the coolest day of the month, the 
thermometer at 3 p.m. showing 75 degrees, and falling at 
night to 60. 1 

Routine business occupied the Convention till noon, 
when St. Just sent word to the committee that, wounded 
by what had been said to him at last night's meeting, he 
had decided not to submit his speech, but was now about 
to deliver it. The committee accordingly hurried to the 
Convention, and St. Just began what would have been 
an hour's speech in the same strain as Robespierre ; but 
he pointedly attacked Billaud, and passed reflections on 
the military dictatorship of Carnot, who in fact three days 
previously had sent to the frontier a portion of the Paris 
artillery, a measure too opportune to have been a mere 
coincidence. But St. Just had only uttered a few sentences 

1 Abreviateur Universel, 1794. 



460 PARIS IN 1789-94 

when he was interrupted by Tallien. Billaud, moreover, 
denounced the riotous scene overnight at the Jacobins, 
and pointed out in the gallery one of the ringleaders who 
had threatened the lives of the deputies. "Arrest him!" 
shouted deputies, and the man was taken away in custody 
amid frantic applause. Billaud, who had a good voice and 
delivery, proceeded to complain of St. Just's breach of 
faith, and Lebas, persistently demanding a hearing before 
Billaud had ended, was called to order by president Collot. 
Billaud attacked Robespierre as a would-be tyrant, and 
protested that not a single deputy would think life worth 
having under a tyrant. " No, perish tyrants ! " shouted 
the deputies. 

When Billaud descended the tribune, Robespierre, who, 
not taking his usual place on "the Mountain," had all the 
time been standing near it, advanced towards it, but there 
were cries of " Down with the tyrant ! " and Tallien 
denounced him as a second Cromwell. " I have come 
with a dagger," he said, " to pierce his breast if the Con- 
vention has not tlie courage to order his arrest." He 
wound up an excited harangue by proposing that the 
Convention should sit en permanence, and that Hanriot, the 
head of the 110,000 National Guards, should with his 
satellites be arrested. This was agreed to. Robespierre 
meanwhile was either at the tribune or at the foot of it, 
claiming a hearing, 1 but deputies again shouted, " Down 
with the tyrant ! " Thuriot, who by this time had as vice- 
president taken the chair in Collot's place, probably by 
arrangement because of his greater muscular force, 
drowned Robespierre's shrill voice by violently ringing 
his bell, accompanied by exclamations of, "Tu n'as pas la 

1 According to Barere, Robespierre, who had been seated at the foot of the 
tribune, ascended it simultaneously with himself, claiming to be first heard, but 
amid cries of "Down with the tyrant" Barere obtained priority. During his 
speech, however, Robespierre remained standing at the tribune, hat in hand, and 
did not descend till his arrest was ordered (Afemoires). But Barere exaggerates 
his own share in the overthrow of Robespierre. What is certain is that the 
Thermidorians feared that if Robespierre obtained a hearing he would win over 
the Convention. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 461 

parole." Robespierre had probably by this time shouted 
himself hoarse, so that he could no longer use his voice, 
but it is not likely that he was taunted with the remark, 
" Danton's blood chokes thee," for nobody as yet thought 
of vindicating the memory of Danton. It is believed that 
seeing u the Mountain," the Jacobins sitting on the upper 
benches, against him he made a despairing appeal to " the 
Plain," the timorous men who to save their own lives had 
abstained from opposition to all excesses. " Upright and 
virtuous men," he exclaimed, " grant me the hearing which 
assassins refuse me." But they, in confabulations of the 
previous night, had agreed to join in overturning him 
on condition of the revolutionary tribunal slackening its 
terrible pace. They were consequently deaf to Robes- 
pierre's appeal. His arrest was proposed, whereupon his 
brother and Couthon manfully demanded to share his 
fate. St. Just, who had remained silent after his speech 
had been stopped, was also included in the list, and the 
arrests were unanimously voted. " The brigands triumph " 
were among Robespierre's last words, if we may trust the 
Momteur, and though its report was not published till two 
days after, when all was over, it is not likely to have in- 
vented the exclamation. 1 

At the instance of Collot, St. Just was required to hand 
in the manuscript of his speech. Collot accused the 
Robespierrists of contemplating a repetition of the 31st 
May, that is to say, the coercing and purging of the 
Convention, whereupon Robespierre exclaimed, "You lie." 
This excited great uproar, and Clansel insisted that the 
ushers should carry out the orders of arrest. President 
Thuriot explained that the ushers had gone up to the 
accused, but that they had refused to stir from their places. 
This implies that Robespierre, after his ineffectual attempts 
to speak, had quitted the tribune. Lozeau demanded that 

1 Vol. xxi. 335. The Moniteur acknowledged (xxiv. 95) that its reports 
previous to Thermidor were frequently revised by the Public Safety Committee, 
and that on the 23rd Prairial in particular, when the Convention decided that its 
members could not be prosecuted without its own consent, considerable alterations 
were made. 



462 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the accused should, like the Girondins on a similar occasion, 
descend to the bar. " Yes, yes, to the bar ! " shouted 
several deputies, the Convention decided accordingly, and 
the five doomed men — or rather four, for Couthon must 
have been carried by his bearers — went down to the bar. 
Up to this point we are not told what had been the 
demeanour of the galleries, crowded with people who 
must have been mostly Robespierrists, and certainly nume- 
rous enough to have attempted a rescue. But when Collot 
exclaimed " Never will the French people tolerate a tyrant," 
the galleries joined the deputies in echoing the cry. 
They would doubtless have cheered Robespierre had he 
triumphed, for a mob is notoriously fickle. The sitting 
was suspended at five o'clock. The deputies went off to 
dinner, and dinner was provided for the prisoners in the 
ante-room of the General Security Committee, whither 
they had been taken. Carriages were then sent for, and 
Robespierre was taken to the Luxembourg, Augustin to 
St. Lazare, St. Just to the Scotch College, Couthon to Port 
Royal, and Lebas to La Force, all to be kept in solitary 
confinement. The Tuileries section x had received orders, 
moreover, at half-past three to place seals on Robespierre's 
and Couthon's papers. But at two o'clock the Commune 
had sent directions to all the prisons to admit no fresh 
inmates. St. Just and Couthon were nevertheless admitted 
at the Scotch College and Port Royal, but St. Lazare had 
refused to receive Augustin and the Conciergerie to receive 
Lebas, whereupon both were taken to La Force. Robes- 
pierre also was refused admission at the Luxembourg, 
but he asked the officer to take him to the Mairie or 
municipal police-office, quai des Orfevres, at the back of 
the Palace of Justice and Conciergerie. This was used 
as a prison, so that Robespierre by going thither remained 
nominally a prisoner, though with friendly keepers. He 
contemplated awaiting there either the triumph of the 
Commune or a trial and triumphant acquittal by the 

1 Not the Place Vendome section, the fidelity of which was evidently con- 
sidered doubtful. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 463 

tribunal, and the latter would perhaps have been the result. 
But the leaders of the Commune, Fleuriot-Lescot, the 
mayor, Payan, the public prosecutor, and Hanriot, head 
of the National Guards, had resolved on resistance to the 
Convention. 

Although Dumas had been arrested, not as commonly 
stated, while sitting at the revolutionary tribunal, but at 
his own house, his day's work being over, the forty-five 
prisoners condemned by him had meanwhile been sent 
off as usual at 4 p.m. to the guillotine at the place du Trone. 
There is no foundation for the legend, adopted by Carlyle 
and Michelet, of an attempted rescue. Even if the conflict 
between Robespierre and the Convention had then been 
generally known, that part of the city was in proximity to 
the Commune at the Hotel de Ville and under its influence. 
The story seems to have arisen from a stir that afternoon 
among the masons at work at a sugar refinery in the 
faubourg St. Antoine, occasioned by the promulgation by 
the Commune, on the 6th, of the maximum or tariff of 
wages. The 9th, the eve of the Jacobin Sabbath, being 
pay-day, that tariff was then for the first time put in force, 
and occasioned discontent. The uproar is recorded in the 
register of the Quatre Nations section. 1 It is true that 
Sanson, the executioner, suggested a postponement till 
next day, on account, not of fear of rescue, but of this 
disturbance ; but Fouquier directed him to start all the 
same. Equally devoid of truth is the assertion of Barras 
that he saved from the scaffold two cartloads of prisoners 
— whether on the 9th or the 10th he does not explain — 
whom Fouquier was sending off for execution. The 
persons condemned on the 9th were executed by 7 P.M., 
as the minutes of the military escorts show, 2 and the 10th 
was the Sabbath, when the tribunal, as also on the 20th 
and 30th of each month, rested, though it was destined 
to meet specially on that day to order the execution of 
Robespierre and his confederates. The objections offered 
moreover on the 10th to the suspension of the tribunal 

1 F. 2507. 2 Martel, Types Rh>olutionnaires. ii. 382. 



464 PARIS IN 1789-94 

show that there had been no intention of stopping the 
Terror, much less of avenging or rehabilitating Danton or 
the Girondins, who were still denounced even on the 10th. 
The stories of people who would have been guillotined on 
the nth but for Robespierre's fall are likewise mythical. 
A list of fourteen persons for trial on the nth had been 
prepared, but it contains no name of any prominence. 1 

But let me return to the Commune. The Convention 
had, that morning, abolished the office of commander of 
the National Guard, resolving that each head of a battalion 
should command in rotation ; but Hanriot, defying this 
decree, like that for his arrest, had galloped down to the 
Tuileries to release Robespierre and his associates. He 
arrived, however, too late, and was himself apprehended. 
But Coffinhal, one of the revolutionary tribunal judges, 
went to the rescue, and Hanriot, liberated after an hour's 
detention, delivered a fervid harangue, which induced some 
of the gendarmes on duty to desert their posts and accom- 
pany him back to the Hotel de Ville. If, instead of return- 
ing thither, he had marched into the Convention, he might 
probably have overpowered it and thus secured the triumph 
of his party; but he was perhaps afraid of disobeying orders 
and acting on his own initiative, lest he should afterwards 
be disavowed and possibly guillotined. 

The tocsin meanwhile had been ringing and drums 
beating to summon the National Guard, and from six 
o'clock 80 or 90 of the 144 members of the Commune 
had been deliberating. They sent orders to the sections 
to despatch each two delegates to take the oath to save 
the Republic. Robespierre, quite content to remain with 
his friendly jailors and with a courtyard full of sympathisers 
to wait events, refused to stir when invited by a deputation 
to join the Commune ; but a second deputation followed, 
with a letter, which said, " You do not belong to yourself, 

1 U. 1021. Not only these fourteen, but those also remaining of the 456 
persons ordered for prosecution on the 2nd, may be regarded as saved by the 
10th Thermidor. They included MacSwiney, a captain in Berwick's Franco- 
Irish regiment, and Samuel Baldwin, an English teacher of languages, alleged to 
be a spy. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 465 

but should entirely belong to the country, to the people." 
He could no longer refuse. Escorted by Hanriot, and 
passing through the Palace of Justice, he crossed the Seine 
and the place de Greve, and at about eleven o'clock reached 
the Hdtel de Ville. His brother had already arrived, as well 
as St. Just and Lebas. Couthon, who had also refused to 
stir, yielded only to a letter from Robespierre and St. Just, 
found afterwards in his pocket, which said : " Couthon, 
all the patriots are proscribed. The entire people have 
risen, and it would be betraying them not to come to the 
Maison Commune (Hotel de Ville) where we are." Accord- 
ing to the concierge, he did not leave the prison till one 
o'clock on the 10th. 1 Among the decrees issued by the 
Commune was one offering a civic crown to any one arrest- 
ing Carnot, Fouch6, Tallien, and eleven other deputies, as 
" enemies of the people," in order to " rescue the Conven- 
tion from their oppression." This shows that the Commune 
felt the necessity of pretending to uphold the Convention, 
just as the Long Parliament used the name of Charles I. in 
making war against him. Robespierre is said, however, 
to have hesitated signing manifestoes, that night, asking " In 
whose name ? " 

Meanwhile the Convention had resumed its sitting at 
seven o'clock, but the imprudent suspension for dinner 
had seriously compromised its position. Everything de- 
pended on the section battalions, or National Guards, and 
some of these were wavering, while others were awaiting 
the decisions of the section committees. And the die may 
be said to have depended on the sections nearest to the 
Tuileries, for the Louvre being already in the hands of 
the insurgents, the Convention was in danger of siege and 
capture. The insurgents might enter the hall, arrest or 
expel all the refractory deputies, and induce the remainder 
to rescind all the decisions of the morning, thus obtaining 
for themselves the semblance of legality. 

How many of the sections leaned to the Commune 
it is not easy to say. The Public Safety Committee a. 

1 F. 7. 4433- 

2G 



466 PARIS IN 1789-94 

few days afterwards required them to furnish reports of 
their proceedings on the 9th and 10th, evidently with a 
view to the detection and execution of Robespierrists. 
Sections which had temporised or had actually sided 
with the Commune had consequently every temptation 
to tamper with their records. This was easy where the 
minutes were taken on loose sheets of paper before being 
posted, so to speak, into the ledgers or registers. A leaf 
could scarcely be torn out of the latter without being 
remarked, but this was ventured upon in the Luxembourg 
section, while in the Thermes section a Dr. Bach managed 
to get everything inculpating himself struck out from the 
loose sheets. Some sections sent in a full copy of their 
minutes, but others only a summary. Other registers, as 
is evident from the different shades of ink or different 
handwritings, were posted up from hour to hour, and 
give a faithful picture of what occurred. Each section, 
however, as we have seen, had four committees, and 
these in certain cases differed in opinion. Some sections 
acknowledge that their National Guards were at first mis- 
led or had wavered. Thus the Lombards battalion at 
first declared for the Commune, but on better informa- 
tion withdrew. The Tuileries section was faithful to the 
Convention, and though the commander of the battalion 
refused to march to its assistance, the officer second 
in command did so. In the Roi de Sicile section there 
was a lively scene. The gunners were for joining 
Hanriot, but their commandant refused. They hustled 
the committee who attempted to remonstrate, had a scuffle 
with their fellow-guards, and eventually marched with the 
guns to the Hotel de Ville, but late at night were arrested. 1 
The Thermes section sent commissaries to the Hotel de 
Ville for information, but one of them, pulled by the sleeve 
and pressed to sign the attendance sheet, slipped away. 2 
Forty-three of the signatures thus given were afterwards 
retracted, and the signers, though put on trial, were with 
one exception acquitted. The Halle-au-Ble section arrested 
1 F. 7, 2498. 2 F. 7, 251 1. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 467 

the Commune messengers, and the Grenelle section burnt 
the orders sent by the Commune. The Pantheon and 
several other sections refused to obey the summons of 
the Hotel de Ville, while others sent delegates both to 
the Commune and the Convention, so that whichever 
triumphed they could claim to have taken the right — 
that is, the winning side. Their plea was that they sent 
to the Commune merely to obtain information. Eighty- 
one delegates in all signed the attendance sheet at the 
Hotel de Ville, 1 which would imply the adhesion of forty- 
two committees but not necessarily of forty-two sections. 
Among them, moreover, was Arthur, who signed as dele- 
gate of the Place Vendome section ; yet he was himself 
a member of the Commune, and could not properly be 
a delegate. He was virtually, indeed, the leader of the 
insurrection, the leading man of the five forming the 
executive committee. Several of the orders of the Com- 
mune issued that night are in his bold handwriting, one 
of them being an order to sound the tocsin, 2 whereas 
the Public Safety Committee had prohibited this, as also 
the closing of the barriers. Yet though Arthur represented 
the Place Vendome section on the Commune, that section 
was wavering or hostile, for Robespierre was in the act 
of signing an appeal to it when the crash came. The 
minutes of this section are therefore of special interest, 
and will give a fair idea of what happened in other parts 
of Paris : — 

9-10 Thermidor. At 7 p.m. the [revolutionary] committee 
met. Considering the circumstances, it declared the sitting per- 
manent, and adopted a resolution not to separate till it received 
orders from the General Security and Public Safety Committees. 
Three of our members said they had been requisitioned at four 
o'clock to accompany citizen Lesueur [Leseurre, ex-procureur], 
bearer of orders of the General Safety Committee for the arrest 
of Nuliard, of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Lebas, deputy of 
the National Convention. At eight o'clock Monsieur Maillefeur 
presented himself to the committee and requisitioned one of our 

1 F. 7, 4433- 2 A - F - »■ 47- 



468 PARIS IN 1789-94 

members for the arrest of Chatelet, juror of the tribunal. Citizen 
Lamtret, secretary-general of the Security Committee, also appeared 
before the committee and requisitioned a commissary for the arrest 
of St. Just. At 9.30 one of our members went to the house of 
detention, rue des Capucines, to enjoin the strictest watch over 
the prisoners, and at the request of the officer of the guardhouse 
a reinforcement was sent him. At this moment the president read 
a decree of the Public Safety and General Security Committees 
which enjoined the Revolutionary Committees to be at their posts, 
and asked for hourly reports of the events which might occur. The 
Paris Commune sent a summons to the committee to go thither and 
take the oath to save the country. The committee passed to the 
order of the day [i.e. refused], it being at its post, and in existing 
circumstances it would only obey orders emanating from the joint 
committees of the Convention. Citizens Briffaut and Philipon, 
commanding the armed force of the section, frequently came to 
the committee in accordance with the instructions sent them to 
notify the good spirit which prevailed among the citizens, who 
awaited and would obey only the orders of the Convention to 
march. At 11.30 citizen Mugin came to communicate to citizen 
Briffaut an order from citizen Goupilleau, representative of the 
people, by which half the armed force of the section was requisi- 
tioned to march to the Convention to protect it. After several 
observations made by the commandant on the reading of the order 
of citizen Goupilleau, together with that of citizen Collot d'Herbois, 
whom he had previously seen, a member gave his opinion that he 
should at once march, which the commandant accordingly did. 
At the same moment citizen Maillefeur returned to fetch a member 
to return to the house of Chatelet, juror of the tribunal. The 
general assembly being formed at midnight, the committee con- 
stantly watched over the spirit which prevailed, and saw with 
warm satisfaction that there was no agitation, and that although 
the individuals arrested dwelt in the section they found no sup- 
porters. After the reading of the proclamation [of the Convention] 
it was resolved that a deputation of twenty-four members should go 
to the Convention. Several sections sent deputations to announce 
that they had taken a like step. Citizen Payan, a member of the 
Convention, presented himself, to place himself at the head of 
the armed force of the section, a detachment of which had already 
started at midnight, commanded by citizen Briffaut, to go with him 
to the Convention. The sitting ended, and six men remained to 
receive the deputations. Citizen Payan assumed the command of 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 469 

the armed force, and during this interval various patrols mounted 
guard to protect the public buildings. The sitting was suspended 
at eight in the morning. 1 

Although the Jacobin club was situated in this section, 
its members must have chiefly consisted of people from 
other quarters, for the section comprised the principal 
shops in Paris, viz. those in the rue St. Honore. The 
section moreover had a club of its own, which seems to 
have been regarded with suspicion by its formidable neigh- 
bour. The Jacobin club refused it the so-called affiliation — 
that is to say, refused to recognise it as a sister or branch 
society. Apparently to wipe off the reproach of mode- 
rantism, this sectional club in January 1794 had undergone 
a " purge." A committee excluded all members who had 
voted against Hanriot as commander of the National 
Guard, and it " postponed " others. The latter could 
not be readmitted unless fifteen persons testified in their 
favour. The report of this operation, by Moussard, ac- 
knowledges that out of 5000 inhabitants of the section 
only 400 belonged to the club. " Yes, revolutionary men 
are few in number, but we shall nevertheless triumph." 
All this shows that Robespierre had few adherents among 
his immediate neighbours, and explains the adhesion of 
the Place Vendome section to the Convention. 

Eleven sectional general meetings, two revolutionary, 
nine civil, and one correspondence committees sent their 
adhesion to the Commune, not to speak of the Jacobin 
club, which had met at three o'clock, had refused an 
application from the General Security Committee for 
Robespierre's manuscript, and had sent delegates to the 
Commune. On the other hand, the minutes of the Con- 
vention show that thirty-nine sectional committees pre- 
sented themselves before the issue was known, with 
assurances of fidelity. 

The Convention conferred on Barras the military 

1 F. 7, 2475. All in one handwriting and ink, without erasures, and evi- 
dently written at the time, the next day's minutes being in different ink. 



470 PARIS IN 1789-94 

command, it outlawed Robespierre and his associates as hav- 
ing broken loose from prison, and it outlawed the Commune 
also as in a state of rebellion. Fleuriot-Lescot, indeed, had 
scornfully torn up the summons of the Convention to 
appear at the bar, saying to the usher, "We shall come, 
but the people with us also." At eleven o'clock the Con- 
vention despatched twelve of its members, attired with 
scarf and sword, to go the round of the sections, and an- 
nounce the decrees of outlawry. The decrees were also 
cried about midnight, between the Tuileries and the quai 
du Louvre, by torchlight, for the lamps were not then lit in 
summer, and the moon was only two days old. 

Meanwhile Hanriot had mustered his forces in front of 
the Hotel de Ville, and it seems clear that had he marched 
to the Tuileries he would have encountered little or no 
resistance. But the Commune gave him no orders for 
taking the offensive, and evidently had no apprehension of 
being itself attacked. At midnight a heavy rain set in. 1 
During these hours of inaction, Hanriot's force doubtless 
discussed matters among themselves and with the people 
drawn by curiosity to the spot. By-and-by the decrees of 
outlawry became known. Was it the effect of these or of 
the rain that the men gradually took French leave, and left 
the square nearly empty ? Hanriot manifestly should have 
been present to keep them in hand, but he was inside the 
Hotel de Ville, perhaps drinking, perhaps conferring or 
gossiping with the Commune. At half-past two, delegates 
from the Jacobin club again presented themselves, and this 
is the last entry on the minutes of the Commune. Only 
forty members were then in attendance ; the other forty or 
fifty were either in committee-rooms or had gone home to 
sleep — the latter supposition would account for only about 
twenty members being arrested in the building. Robes- 
pierre and his confederates were in an anteroom adjoining 
the hall. What was he waiting for ? Apparently for a 
larger force, inasmuch as he was signing an appeal to the 
Place Vendome section. He was not the man to mount 

1 The Seine rose an inch that night. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 471 

on horseback and harangue the populace. Perhaps he 
could not ride, for he is said to have unsuccessfully 
attempted equitation in Pare Monceau ; he certainly could 
not improvise speeches. St. Just, too, except on his pro- 
vincial missions, was more a man of talk than of action. 
His very last speech had a lame and impotent conclusion, 
viz. a mere resolution that in the forthcoming Constitution 
arbitrary power, ambition, and oppression, or usurpation 
against the Convention should be prevented. And Couthon 
was a cripple. As for the Commune, Robespierre had 
guillotined Chaumette and his associates, the only men of 
initiative and daring. It had since been his subservient 
tool ; it was incapable of conducting an insurrection. He 
had also in March induced the Convention to disband the 
so-called " revolutionary army," comprising 6000 Parisians 
of the worst class, with Ronsin at its head. This step was 
taken on account, not of its scandalous excesses at Lyons 
and elsewhere, but of its Hebertism. 

While Robespierre was thus waiting for reinforcements, 
so that at daylight the Convention might be attacked and 
" purged," Barras and Bourdon had succeeded in collecting 
the Gravilliers, Lombards, and Arcis battalions, and at 
about one o'clock Barras led one column up the rue St. 
Honor6, towards the Hdtel de Ville, while Bourdon headed 
a second column which advanced along the quays. Bour- 
don found the place de Greve nearly empty, and the few 
of Hanriot's followers still remaining there either fled or 
joined him. He seized on all the doors, and forced his 
way into the Hotel de Ville. Hanriot, finding that all was 
lost, flung himself out of a window, but was not seriously 
injured. Augustin Robespierre did the like, and was 
bruised and battered. Lebas shot himself, and probably 
offered a second pistol to Robespierre. Couthon, trying to 
creep down a staircase, fell senseless from knocking his 
head against the wall. Robespierre was found lying near a 
table, his lower jaw fractured by a pistol-shot ; he had no 
cravat or shoes, his stockings were down at the heels, 
his coat and shirt were stained with blood, his trousers 



472 PARIS IN 1789-94 

unbuttoned. Had he attempted suicide, or had he been shot 
by Merda ? We shall never know for certain. The brag- 
gart Merda's first version 1 was that he snatched a knife 
from Robespierre — perhaps the pocket-knife which Robes- 
pierre, during the scene in the Convention, had been 
nervously fingering, holding it open in his hand — and that 
with it he stabbed Couthon. On second thoughts he 
claimed to have shot Robespierre. 2 The daily broadside 
issued by the Convention stated on the 10th that " Robes- 
pierre fired his pistol into his mouth, and received at the 
same time a shot from a gendarme, that the tyrant fell, 
bathed in his own blood, and that a sansculotte went up to 
him and coolly uttered these words — ' There is a Supreme 
Being.'" According to Bochard, the concierge of the 
Hotel de Ville, Robespierre fired at himself, but missed, 
very nearly shooting Bochard, and then, rushing off, 
stumbled on him. This would account for his disordered 
toilette, which implies a fall or a scuffle. The description 
given of the wound leaves the question doubtful. 3 FreYon 
asserts that Robespierre habitually carried a pair of pistols 
in his pocket, and that latterly he had practised shooting 
in a garden. Considering the "hemlock" passage in his 
speech, and his classical tastes, he probably fired at himself 
in a bungling fashion. Merda may have also fired and 
missed. Both Barras and Barere describe Robespierre as 
attempting suicide. 

As soon as the Convention had triumphed, there was, of 
course, a throng of sectional and other deputations who 
were profuse in congratulations. But let us turn from 
this sickening spectacle and watch what became of the 
vanquished. Lebas, alone, had killed himself ; St. Just had 

1 Moniteur, xxi. 345. 

2 Charles Andre Merda, twenty-one years of age, was a gendarme in the 
squadron Hommes du 14 juillet. On the 25th Thermidor he was appointed sub- 
lieutenant in the 5th Chasseurs. He served in Napoleon's campaigns, became a 
colonel in 1806, and died of wounds received at Moscow in 18 12. He altered his 
name to Meda. He left no issue. His nephew, Meng, in 1867 assumed the 
name of Meda. 

3 Aulard, Etudes sur la Revolution. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 473 

been captured, unharmed ; Couthon had received bruises ; 
Augustin Robespierre, it is said, was so injured by his fall 
that he would have died next day. It must have been at 
first reported that he also was dead, for the Public Safety 
Committee ordered the removal and burial of his body. 1 
Fleuriot-Lescot, Payan, and eleven members of the Com- 
mune — one of them Simon, the Dauphin's brutal ex- 
guardian — had been captured in the Hotel de Ville or 
elsewhere. Robespierre was placed on a litter and carried 
by six firemen, " alike courageous and intrepid," says the 
Lombards section register, to the lobby of the Convention. 
President Collot, in announcing his arrival, remarked that 
the Convention would certainly not wish him to be brought 
in, and he was conveyed to the anteroom of the Public 
Safety Committee. There he was placed on a table, which 
is now at the National Archives. The legend, however, is 
that he lay on the table of the Committee-room, and that a 
week afterwards, when that body sat round it, there were 
still the stains of his blood. After an hour he opened his 
eyes, and with a small bag in his right hand — apparently 
the bag of the pistol which he had used — wiped the blood 
from his mouth. Attendants gave him blotting-paper for 
that purpose, and one of them helped him to pull up his 
stockings, on which he said, " Je vous remercie, monsieur " 
— a curious lapse into pre-revolutionary language. Other 
attendants, less humane, had reviled him. A basin of water 
was also placed beside him, into which he dipped the bits 
of blotting-paper to make them serve instead of a towel. 
According to Barras, he repeatedly asked for writing 
materials, but was refused. He suddenly raised himself, 
slipped off the table, and seated himself on a chair, when 
he asked for water and bits of linen. At 10 o'clock his 
wound was dressed by a surgeon, his mouth being held 
open with a key, that broken teeth might be extracted, and 
a handkerchief being tied round his head to keep the ban- 
dage in position. He remained thus in the chair till half- 
past ten, when he was carried in it to the Conciergerie. The 

1 A. F. ii. 49. 



474 PARIS IN 1789-94 

heavy rain had long ceased, but had been followed between 
8 and 9 by a drizzle which, with few intermissions, lasted 
till the evening. The thermometer, only 60 at 3.30 A.M., 
rose in the afternoon to 77. 1 

Couthon and Gobeau, or Gombaud, Deputy Public 
Prosecutor, were also taken to the Conciergerie. Couthon 
had been carried at 5 o'clock, unconscious, to the Hotel 
Dieu hospital. The wound on his forehead was dressed, 
and on recovering consciousness he explained that it was 
the result of a fall down the stairs on which he was sitting. 
He stated, in answer to questions, that he had been taken 
against his will from prison to the H6tel de Ville, that he 
knew nothing of what passed there, and that though 
accused of being a conspirator, those who could read his 
heart would find this to be untrue. 

The Convention adjourned at 7 A.M., and reassembled 
at 10. What was to be done with the prisoners ? As- 
outlaws, they could be executed without trial, but they 
should be identified by members of the Commune. Now 
the Commune was itself outlawed. The Convention solved 
the difficulty by enacting that identification by ordinary 
citizens should suffice. Accordingly, Robespierre and 
twenty-one of his associates were consigned to the guillo- 
tine, which was to be erected in the place de la Concorde, 
but this apparently took time, for the three carts did not 
start till 4 o'clock. Robespierre, stretched out on one of 
these, was the object along the route of insults and male- 
dictions. " Fashionable ladies on the footways and at the 
windows," says Barras, "waved their handkerchiefs, but 
the populace were quiet." The Duplay family were under 
arrest, so that if the cart stopped before their house to 
allow of cruel exultation at their expense, they were not 
present to undergo the ordeal. Couthon was first exe- 
cuted ; he had to be carried up the steps and placed on 

1 The nth was 8 degrees hotter, and the I2th (30th July) was one of the 
hottest days of the year, viz. 91, but on the 9th July it had been 98. The 23rd, 
24th, and 25th July were comparatively cool, viz. 72, 74, and 73 deg., but the 
rest of July had been sultry {Abreviateur Universel, daily temperature). 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 475 

the block. Then came the turn of St. Just and Augus- 
tin Robespierre. Seventeen municipal officers followed. 
Then came Robespierre, and, as the executioner roughly 
pulled off the handkerchief and bandages, he uttered a cry 
of pain. Fleuriot-Lescot was the last to be executed, but 
Fouquier had intended the triumvirs to come last. It was 
then 7 o'clock, or nearly sunset. "This man," says Durand 
de Maillane, speaking of Robespierre, " this man who had 
occasioned so much anguish to others, suffered in these 
twenty-four hours all that a mortal can suffer of what is 
most painful and poignant." Hunger must have been, too, 
among his pangs, for he manifestly could take no nourish- 
ment after his wound. He had, therefore, tasted no food 
for at least seventeen, probably twenty-two, hours. 

Next day sixty-eight, and, on the 12th Thermidor, eleven 
members of the Commune, with three other satellites of 
Robespierre, shared his fate, but these 104 victims can 
inspire little pity when we consider that their fall put an 
end to the daily butcheries of the Revolutionary Tribunal. 1 

The arrests of those municipal councillors who were 
not captured at the Hotel de Ville are explained by the 
minutes of the Halle-au-Ble Committee, which, seeing that 
the Convention was in rebellion against the national autho- 
rity, had torn up its summons to send delegates. We read 
under the 10th Thermidor: — 

At three in the morning were arrested by a patrol of our section, 
Londel [painter], Geromme [Jerome, carver], and Paris [ex-Professor 
of Belles-lettres], all three members of the Commune of Paris. We 
sent them to the General Security and Public Safety Committees, 
as also a minute of their interrogatories by the commandant of the 
armed force, at five o'clock. 

All three were guillotined on the nth. Simon, though 

1 Executions were also daily going on at Orange. On the ioth Thermidor 
there were three victims; on the 12th, eleven; on the 13th, three; on the 14th, 
two ; on the 15th, three ; on the 16th, two ; on the 17th, five. The order of the 
Convention on the nth to suspend proceedings did not arrive till the 18th, when 
twenty-one persons were about to be tried ; 200 trials were in preparation. In 
forty-six days 332 persons had perished. 



476 PARIS IN 1789-94 

he had left the Hotel de Ville, was arrested by the Theatre 
Francais Committee, which, surprised to hear that he was 
at liberty, found him at a hairdresser's. He might have 
saved himself the trouble of this last toilette. 

All these bodies were interred in the field or garden 
adjoining Pare Monceau. Barras is guilty of impudent 
falsehood when he alleges that Robespierre was buried 
by his orders in the same grave as Louis XVI. in the 
Madeleine Cemetery, and that the supposed remains of 
the king, removed in 1816 to St. Denis, were probably 
those of Robespierre. 

Charlotte Robespierre, on learning her brother's fall, so 
far from rushing to the Conciergerie to see him, faint- 
ing in the street on being refused admission, and finding 
herself on her recovery in prison — a fable which she had 
herself perhaps got to believe — concealed herself under her 
mother's name of Carrant or Careau, but was arrested on 
the 13th Thermidor, and taken to the Postes section. 
There she repudiated her brothers, even alleging that they 
intended to kill her, but was nevertheless imprisoned for 
nine months. She was released on the 13th April 1795, 
having satisfied the General Security Committee that she 
had been persecuted by her brothers and forced to quit 
them. The committee certified that her civic principles 
entitled her to the confidence of good citizens and the 
protection of the authorities. 1 Napoleon, in 1803, following 
the example of the Thermidorians, granted her a pension of 
3600 francs, in consideration, doubtless, of his intimacy with 
Augustin and of her acquaintance with Josephine. The 
Restoration reduced the pension to 1800 francs, but the 
duchesse d'Angouleme is said to have supplemented it. 2 " It 
was not her silence," remarks M. Lenotre, " which was thus 
purchased, but her renunciation." Yet in her will, dated 
1828, she protested her attachment to her brother. She 
died in 1834, having passed many years in obscurity under 
the name of Carrant. She refused to receive extreme 
unction. 

1 A.F. ii. 278. 2 Inter?nddiare, March 24, 1895. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 477 

Couthon's wife and sister were arrested on the 10th 
Thermidor, and sent to the English convent. 1 

Let us turn to the fate of the Duplays. Father, mother, 
son, and daughter Sophie were arrested at 9 p.m. on the 
9th, and were taken first to the Tuileries section, then to 
the guardhouse, and lastly to St. Pelagie. There two days 
afterwards the mother committed suicide. Whether she 
was driven to this by the taunts of her fellow-prisoners is 
uncertain. On the 13th the nephew, Simon, was sent to 
La Force, and Madame Lebas, the married daughter, to 
Petite Force. She had given birth five weeks before to a 
son, named Philip after his father. Victoria was arrested 
at Lille on the 14th, and Eleanor in Paris on the 19th. On 
the 29th August Sophia and Victoria were transferred to 
the Conciergerie with orders that they should be tried, but 
happily the reaction did not go the length of executing 
young women who had simply made a mistake in hero- 
worship. On the 18th September, however, Dubois Cranc6 
spoke of Marie Antoinette and " Cornelie Copeau " (Eleanor 
Duplay) as alike conspirators, 2 and Eleanor was still in 
prison in April 1795. On the 16th November Madame 
Lebas petitioned that her father might be allowed to com- 
municate with his family. He was then at Duplessis, as 
also his son, while the four daughters were in separate 
prisons. She had exhausted the purses of her friends in 
succouring father and sisters, and was then without re- 
sources even for herself and her infant. This appeal seems 
to have led on the 23rd December to Duplay and his son 
and nephew 3 being interrogated. All were asked whether 
Robespierre had not English visitors. The son replied that 
he knew only of Arthur, whose father was English. Robes- 
pierre, he said, during his absence from the Public Safety 

1 A.D. ii.* 255. 2 Moniteur, xxii. 5. 

3 Simon Duplay, the nephew, must have been liberated with the rest of the 
family, for in the spring of 1796, under the name of Sebastien Lalande, he pub- 
lished the Eclaireur du Peuple, in which he advocated the Constitution of I793i 
and extolled Robespierre and Babeuf. His training under Robespierre seems to 
have given him the knack of declamation and vituperation. More fortunate than 
his uncle and cousin, he escaped the rigours of the Directory. 



478 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Committee went early to bed. St. Just was frequently 
closeted with him, but seldom dined with him. The nephew 
stated that Barere dined with Robespierre ten or fifteen 
days before his fall. 

The four daughters — Eleanor signing as Marianne, 
which was probably her second name — jointly petitioned 
for their father's release, urging that though Robespierre 
lodged with him, he had never meddled in politics. 1 The 
petition was unavailing, but on the 4th February 1795 the 
General Security Committee ordered the restitution of 
Madame Lebas' watch, rings, and earrings. 2 Duplay, with 
other jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was put on 
trial, but on the 26th February 1795 was acquitted. He 
was perhaps screened by Collot, who, when committing 
atrocities at Lyons in 1793, had written effusive letters to 
him. He had been transferred from St. Pelagie first to the 
college Duplessis, and then to the Luxembourg. He was 
rearrested, but on the 14th May was liberated. Once more 
apprehended, together with his son, on the 16th May 1796, 
as accomplices of Babeuf, both were acquitted, though he 
had evidently sympathised, if not conspired, with that 
agitator. He had probably given up business, or business 
had given him up, before his appointment as a juror, for 
which he received 18 francs a day. Political commotions 
might have been expected to ruin him, but in May 1796 
he bought the premises in the rue St. Honore for 32,888 
francs (in paper currency). Yet on his trial in 1797 he is 
described as of No. 59 rue St. Honor6, so that he must 
have removed. In 1801 his son-in-law Auzat, as owner of 
half the property, sold the shop, which occupied the street 
frontage, to the tenant, Rouilly, a jeweller. In 1810 
Rouilly bought the entire premises, and in the following 
year, on the rues Richepanse and Duphot being made, he 
demolished the penthouse and the wing which Duplay 
had occupied, and erected the present building. In 18 r6 
he rebuilt the front. Whether the rooms assigned to 
Robespierre were demolished or another story simply 

1 W. 79. 2 A.F. ii.* 27S. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 479 

added is a question which was warmly discussed by Hamel 
and M. Sardou in 1895. The belief of Madame Lebas was 
that all had disappeared, and this has been confirmed by 
the discovery by M. Coyecque, in the Seine archives, of a 
plan of the premises, dated 1783. 1 Duplay died in 1820, 
his daughter Eleanor in 1832, his son in 1847. The son 
was manager of hospitals, and had latterly supported his 
father. Madame Lebas survived till 1859 ; a Robespierrist 
to the last, she had imbued her son, who died in the 
following year, with the same opinions. Arrested in 1813 
for evading the conscription and complicity in the Tours 
conspiracy, he became tutor to the future Napoleon III., 
and was latterly an eminent antiquary. 

The fall of Robespierre was a great relief to Paris, 
especially to the prisoners, who, hearing the tocsin and the 
drums, had passed the night in terrible suspense. There 
were, however, in Paris, both at the time and afterwards, 
occasional tokens of regret. On the nth Thermidor, 
three men in the place Royale tried to stop the singing by 
a hawker of verses against Robespierre, but the mob 
seized them and took them to the police station. Again 
on the 13th, at the Cafe" Foy, a man snatched from a 
hawker a pamphlet against Robespierre and tore it up. 
On the 15th, Montelard, an engraver of assignats, tried to 
blow out his brains, missed, but then cut his throat ; his 
last words on being taken to the hospital were — " Liberty 
is lost, I die for it." On the 7th March 1795 women 
knitting in the Tuileries gardens lamented the rule of their 
bon ami. In November 1795 Antoine Trial, an actor, 
poisoned himself. Intimate with Robespierre, he was 
hissed off the stage on his first appearance after Thermidor, 
and a couple refused to be married by him, though that 
municipal function devolved on him. We hear of a 
prisoner who on the 28th July 1795, when the anniversary 
of Robespierre's fall was being officially celebrated in Paris, 
darkened his cell and suspended his usual singing ; and 
Souberbielle, a doctor, one of the jurors who condemned 

1 Revolution Fratifaise, April 1899. 



480 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Danton, and who lived till 1848, retained to the last his 
admiration for Robespierre, though the latter on the 
10th June 1794 had excluded him from the jury, probably 
because he had hesitated to condemn Danton. Babeuf, 
of course, lamented him as a martyr to liberty. At the 
Babeuf trial in 1796, Fossard, one of the prisoners, 
admitted saying that the people were happier under Robes- 
pierre, for they could then get bread, and assignats were 
worth something. If this opinion, he said, was a crime, he 
was ready to suffer for it. The scarcity of 1795 had also 
occasioned regrets for Robespierre, and at Nancy on the 
19th February there were cries that his rule was the golden 
age of the Republic. 1 In Paris, moreover, on the 2nd April 
1798 Taschereau was arrested for a pamphlet extolling 
Robespierre. 

These isolated lamentations for Robespierre are natural 
enough. What is at first sight more surprising is that his 
fall was deplored by foreign powers. The explanation, 
however, is that they counted on peace under his complete 
dictatorship. They knew that, unlike the Girondins, he had 
always opposed offensive and propagandist wars. Danton 
in this agreed with him. Some think that Robespierre 
disliked war because he was conscious of his hopeless 
ignorance in military matters, and there is a story of his 
being found poring over Carnot's maps and confessing 
that he could not master them ; but we need not attribute 
his dislike of war merely to jealousy of those whose 
comprehension of it gave them a superiority over him. 
War even for ideas was repugnant to his Rousseau 
philosophy, and in a speech at the Jacobin club he wisely 
said : — 

The most extravagant idea which can spring up in the heart 
of a politician is the belief that for a people to enter, armed, a 
foreign nation is the way to make the latter adopt its laws and con- 
stitution. Nobody likes armed missionaries, and the first counsel 
given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies. 

1 Moniteur, xxiii. 575. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 481 

Foreign powers were therefore warranted in deploring 
him, and it was not altogether without reason that Clansel 
stated in the Convention on the 3rd October 1794 that 
the Pope and the allied monarchs were in despair at his 
fall, and that Pitt had declared that civil war must now 
be seriously fomented in France. The English Govern- 
ment, moreover, or at any rate Grenville, the Foreign 
Secretary, had been misled by the reports of a Paris spy, 
procured and more or less vouched for by Drake, its 
minister at Genoa, reports full of grotesque fables. Robes- 
pierre was actually represented as secretly taking the poor 
little Dauphin from the Temple to Meudon. 1 Even the 
exiled Pretender, the future Louis XVIII., if we are to 
believe Courtois, 2 had also counted on Robespierre, ad- 
dressing to him a score of letters eulogising his efforts 
to restore order. There is no reason, however, for thinking 
that Robespierre, though very amenable to flattery, sent 
any replies. 

As for the retrospective regrets of the Thermidorians, 
they count for little. These men merely lamented Robes- 
pierre because they had seen that his fall cleared the way 
for Bonaparte, whose sway reduced them to insignificance. 
Vadier, exiled as a regicide in 1816, used to say with tears, 
" We murdered Robespierre, and the Republic with him." 
Barere, who on the 21st January 1795 had proposed that 
the 10th Thermidor should be an annual festival, stated 
a few years before his death that Robespierre's overthrow 
was the only act which he regretted. 3 But his posthumous 
Memoirs show no sign of such remorse, any more than 
those of Barras, who likewise told Alexandre Dumas that 
he regretted Thermidor. 

Robespierre's popularity was largely due to his pro- 
fessions of incorruptibility, and he certainly despised wealth, 
or he might have speculated in the purchase of confiscated 
property, for who would latterly have ventured to bid 

1 Dropmore Papers, Hist. MSS. Commission, 1896. 

2 Proudhon's notes in Cosmopolis, October 1896. 

3 Marquis de Nadaillac, Correspondant, July 10, 1896. 

2 H 



482 PARIS IN 1789-94 

against him ? His poverty, however, has been exaggerated. 
On the nth Thermidor, the Champs Elys^es section was 
informed that he had had lodgings at 5 rue de l'Union, and 
seals were placed on them. This, however, might have 
been Duplay's unlet house in the rue d'Angouleme (now rue 
La Boetie). But on the 12th the General Safety Committee 
ordered seals to be placed on the maison de campagne 
"owned by the wretch Robespierre" at Meudon. 1 Accord- 
ing to a denunciation made after his death he frequently 
went to Issy, to a suburban house formerly belonging to 
the princesse de Chimay. 2 Couthon also had a house just 
outside Paris, at Passy. St. Just, as we have seen, was in 
debt, and there is really no evidence that the triumvirs 
enriched themselves. Had there been the slenderest 
foundation for such a charge, it would certainly have 
been seized upon. 

Robespierre's papers were seized, and were partially 
published by Courtois, who appropriated some of those 
not inserted in his report, and presented several to Cortiez 
(de l'Oise). These are now among the Filon autographs. 
On the 17th February 1795 there were complaints in the 
Convention of Courtois's omissions, and the publication 
of the entire papers was advocated, but it was resolved 
that letters of deputies should alone be printed in the 
supplementary report, as many of Robespierre's corre- 
spondents had been excusably misled. Among the papers 
is a list of " patriots having more or less ability," one 
hundred and thirteen in number. One is a horse-dealer, 
there are three surgeons, and there are two Simons, one 
doubtless the infamous tormentor of the Dauphin. Then 
there are Dumas and Coffinhal, the sanguinary judges of the 
Revolutionary Tribunal. Robespierre describes as a " pure 
patriot, fit for a public post," Gattean, who in a letter from 
Strasburg, addressed to Daubigny, but forwarded to and pre- 
served by Robespierre, had said : " St. Guillotine is in the 
most brilliant activity, and the beneficent Terror produces 
here in a miraculous manner what could not be expected 
1 A.D. ii. 255. 2 F. 7, 4432. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 483 

for at least a century from reason and philosophy. Quel 
maitre-bongre que ce garcon-ld (St. Just)." In some cases 
Robespierre mentions the persons who had recommended 
the '* patriots." Such of these "patriots" as are known are 
known only to their disadvantage, and it may not un- 
charitably be concluded that the remainder were men of 
the same stamp. This list of sycophants throws an un- 
pleasant light on Robespierre's character. So too with 
the reports of his spies, and his careful preservation not 
only of these, but of fawning and threatening letters, alike 
nourishment for his pride. A young woman with a com- 
petency at Nantes wrote, without ever having seen him, 
to offer him marriage. Grievances, denunciations, even an 
American offer to supply wheat, were addressed to him. 
There are undated notes, apparently memoranda for 
speeches, in which he urges the proscription of anti- 
revolutionary writers, the diffusion of "good" publica- 
tions, the punishment of conspirators, especially of deputies, 
and the paying and arming of sansculottes. One note 
" suspend labours until the country is saved, change the 
local," seems to corroborate the belief that he wished to 
prorogue the Convention and remove it from Paris. There 
are likewise sketches of five deputies whom he styles 
" leaders of the coalition," and whom he depicts as wretches 
devoid of morality and patriotism. There is also a speech, 
never delivered, denouncing the two extremes, moderates 
and ultras. 

But by far the most interesting of Robespierre's docu- 
ments is a notebook in which for the last three months 
of 1793 he jotted down his ideas and intentions. It is 
about five inches by three inches in size, and consists of 
sheets of very ordinary yellowish paper, with a marble- 
paper cover, such as was then frequently used for covering 
pamphlets. The entries are mostly on the right-hand page, 
but an entry is sometimes continued overleaf, and occasion- 
ally the left-hand page seems to be used for a hasty scrawl, 
to be repeated more legibly on the next page. The right- 
hand pages are numbered consecutively at the corner, from 



484 PARIS IN 1789-94 

1 to 17. A pencil is here and there used, but the entries 
are, with few exceptions, in ink, now very pale. Many 
entries have a line drawn through or across them, as if 
to indicate that their purpose had been fulfilled. The 
calligraphy is very unlike the small, neat, pedantic hand- 
writing found in Robespierre's signatures to public docu- 
ments. He evidently, like most people, had two hands — 
one studiously legible, the other for his private use, a 
hasty scrawl. Hence some of these entries cannot be 
deciphered without difficulty. In the left-hand corner 
of p. 1 we read " No. 16," which may mean that he had 
had fifteen previous books, but I am not sure that it is 
in his handwriting. Strange to say, Courtois published 
only five short passages, about eighty words in all, from 
this book, and he suppressed the indications of date, so 
as to convey the impression that Robespierre was using 
it just before his fall, whereas he must have for six months 
discontinued using notebooks, and, as the other documents 
would imply, employed only loose sheets of paper. The 
notebook, together with some of Robespierre's other papers, 
has for many years been on view under a glass case at the 
Archives Museum, standing open to show the last entry ; 
but that museum, though containing historical documents 
which should be as interesting to Frenchmen as Magna 
Charta at the British Museum is to Englishmen (some 
of them, too, much more ancient), attracts scarcely any 
visitors. What is more surprising is that until 1883 no 
French writer on the Revolution had had the idea of 
examining the notebook and supplementing Courtois's 
meagre quotations. In that year M. Welschinger printed 
the entire contents in a review, and he reprinted this in 
1890, but in a collection of essays entitled Le Roman de 
Dumouriez, and the sub - titles escaped observation. 1 It 
is singular that M. Welschinger should not have placed 
first and as the main title what was certainly the most 

1 In giving an account of the book in the Athenceum, October 31, 1896, 
I was consequently ignorant of M. Welschinger's publication. The Revue 
Critique gave me a clue to it. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 485 

interesting chapter in his book. While commenting, too, 
on the suspicion and distrust which pervade the note- 
book, he overlooks the fact that the entries end on the 
27th December 1793. 

The subjoined extracts, forming about one-fourth of 
the contents, will give an idea of the entries. For the 
sake of convenience I follow Robespierre's pagination, 
treating an entry on the left-hand page as a continuation 
of that on the previous right-hand page : — 

Page i. 

1. Nomination of the members of the Revolutionary Tribunal. 
2. Formation of committees, and firstly of the Contracts Com- 
mittee. 3. Complete the despatch of commissaries to Brest, Cher- 
bourg, and the ports in general. 4. Rescind the decree which 
repeals the law on the property of foreigners. 5. The decree which 
prescribes that emigres shall be tried by all the criminal tribunals. 
6. Order the ministers to give a list of their clerks and attendants. 

Hold the revolutionary army ready, and recall the detachments 
of it to Paris, in order to frustrate the conspiracy. 

Indefinite postponement of the new calendar. 

This is cancelled, but it gives a clue to the date, for 
the Jacobin calendar, postponed on the 20th September 
1793, was adopted on the 5th October, so that this entry 
must have been a little earlier. 

Page 3. 

The tax on tobacco destroys our commercial relations with 
America. 

Page 4. 

Organisation of the committee [evidently of Public Safety]. 1. 
Infamous violation of the committee's secrets, either by the clerks 
or by other persons. 2. Change your clerks, expel everywhere the 
traitor who sits in your midst. 3. Punish the clerk who handed 
you a letter to sign, the object of which was to induce the possessors 
of the documents of conspiracy respecting the ancien regime to burn 



486 PARIS IN 1789-94 

them. 5. Revocation of the decree which establishes revolutionary 
tribunals everywhere. 

Propose \demander\ that Thomas Payne be put on trial, in the 
interests of America as much as of France. 1 



Page 6. 

Departure of Carnot for the army [cancelled]. Force by terror 
the towns lately in rebellion to reveal the arms which they have 
hidden. 

Page 7. 

Departure of Carnot for Dunkirk. Conspirators. Organisation 
of the tribunal. Complete the revolutionary army and purge it. 
Organise the Revolutionary Tribunal. Watch the clubs. Imprison 
and punish the hypocritical counter-revolutionists. Repress the 
journalist impostors. Diffuse good writings. 

Page 8. 

Essential points of government, r. Subsistence and victualling. 
2. War. 3. Public spirit and conspiracy. 4. Diplomacy. Every 
day it is necessary to ask in what condition are these four things. 
Public spirit and conspiracies. Diffuse good writings ; the re- 
pression of libels ; the organisation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, 
and all the measures necessary to punish the conspirators. 

Page ii. 

Polishing is a method of concealing the defects of weapons. 
The patriotic workmen denounce this abuse. 2 

Page 12. 

It is necessary to have all over the republic a small number 
of resolute commissaries furnished with good instructions, and 

1 Paine, not aware that this was written in October 1793, and that Robes- 
pierre must have changed his mind, or would not have allowed six months to 
elapse without bringing him to trial, naturally concluded that Robespierre to the 
last was bent on guillotining him. 

2 Montgaillard's pamphlet on France in May 1794 states that most of the 
muskets, made in improvised factories, churches, mansions, and squares, were 
unserviceable on account of haste and clumsiness. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 487 

especially with good principles, to bring all minds to unity and 
republicanism, the only way of soon terminating the Revolution 
to the benefit of the people. The commissaries will set themselves 
especially to discovering and inventorying the men worthy of serving 
the cause of liberty. We must have a circumstantial list of all the 
prisoners. 

Page 13. 

It is necessary to prosecute the deputies, leaders of the con- 
spiracy [the proscribed Girondins], and strike them down at what- 
ever cost. There must be a circumstantial list of all the prisoners. 

Courtois quoted this, but not the continuation : — 

It is necessary that all the individuals known should be promptly 
punished. Decree that all those who shelter conspirators shall be 
visited with the same punishment. 

Page 14. 
Arrest surgeon Le Febvre. 

Robespierre at first wrote " Fourrier," but cancelled it. 

Page 15. 

Remind the public prosecutor about Perrochet. 1 Remind the 
public prosecutor about La Marliere [cancelled : La Marliere 
was interrogated nth September, and tried and guillotined on 
6 Frimaire]. Speak on the report of the Committee of General 
Security, ask for its being more complete. Save the honour of 
the Convention and of the Mountain. Distinguish the shade of 
difference between the leaders of the corruption and the weak and 
misled [cancelled]. 

Page 16. 

1 7 Frimaire. A fresh attack on Dunkirk is announced. Toulon. 
Dugommier writes on the way in which he has conducted himself 
towards the English general [O'Hara]. Revolutionary Tribunal to 
be watched. Organisation to be reformed. 

1 Probably Perruchut, ex-mayor of St. Malo, guillotined June 20, 1794. 



488 PARIS IN 1789-94 

Page 17. 

7 Nivose. Unmask the twofold intrigue. Decide on Gerard. 
Report on the revolutionary tribunal. Public Prosecutor exposed 
[a nu\ Lorient affair. 1 Pantheon for the young hussar, Gasparin 
and Bayle. Rescind the decree in favour of the wives of con- 
spirators. 

Some of these ideas and even expressions are identical 
with passages in his notes previously mentioned, and 
written, judging by a reference to the festival of the 
Supreme Being, later than the 8th June 1794. Robes- 
pierre's views, therefore, had in the last six months under- 
gone no change. The notebook reveals, moreover, his 
suspicious temper, and it shows how he watched the 
Revolutionary Tribunal and prompted the infamous Fou- 
quier. These " reminders " to bring prisoners to trial are 
revolting, and should silence all attempts to exculpate 
Robespierre from active complicity in the daily butcheries. 
It is significant, moreover, that in the very last entry he 
demands increased vigour against the wives of prisoners. 
In all his papers, including, as has been seen, one written 
within a few weeks of his fall, there is not the slightest hint 
of a cessation of the daily executions. Yet he recalled the 
monster Carrier from Nantes, and he overthrew the Hubert 
faction, which was even more sanguinary than himself. 
He also saved the lives of the seventy-three imprisoned 
Girondin deputies, whom he must have intended ultimately 
to reinstate in the Convention. Assuredly the Thermido- 
rians are entitled to no admiration. Most of them had 
Robespierre's faults without his virtues. Some were little 
less responsible than he for the judicial massacre, 2 and 
their intention in overthrowing him was simply to save 
their own heads, not to put an end to the Terror, a result 

1 Attempt to burn down the magazines. 

2 Billaud was at least on one occasion more inhuman than Robespierre, for 
when Madame Philippeaux solicited an audience of the Convention to plead for 
her husband's life, he proposed that she should be admitted and that a letter 
proving her husband's guilt should be read to her. Robespierre successfully 
objected to this revolting proposal. 



THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE 489 

quite unexpected by them. Nevertheless Robespierre 
reminds us of the lunatic in the balloon, bent on throwing 
over the ballast in order to reach the moon, whom the 
aeronaut, as the sole chance of deliverance, had to throw 
over. A caricature of the time, indeed, represents Robes- 
pierre as having guillotined all France, and as preparing to 
guillotine himself. Orell, a Swiss, wrote five lines, the con- 
cluding two being — 

II fallait sans tarder faire son dpitaphe, 
Ou bien celle du genre humain. 1 

Carnot's description of Robespierre was "Bad heart, 
mediocre intellect." Condorcet, before becoming his 
victim, had said, " Not an idea in the head, not a sentiment 
in the heart." Barnave, in an unpublished notebook, writes 
in 1792 : — 

He has the genius of anarchy. He would like a nation to exist 
without laws, acknowledging only the Declaration of Rights. Essen- 
tially a tribune, he likes power obtained solely from the effervescence 
of the people, independent of laws. His vanity is extreme and in- 
tolerant. His talents all consist in declamation, and are poor even 
in that kind. But if history is just it will allow him to have been a 
primitive, homogeneous, and inflexible character. I believe him to 
be above all sordid considerations. 2 

M. Aulard, the best living authority on the Revolution, 
commenting on Robespierre's prosecution of Danton, says 
— " I refuse to personify the French Revolution in this 
sanctimonious calumniator, this mystical assassin." Yet 
Michelet says of his death, "This great man was no more ; " 
Louis Blane remarks, " He rose from the dignity of apostle 
to that of martyr ;" and Hamel describes him as "One of 
the best men who have figured on the earth." 

1 Moniteur, xxii. 564. 2 W. 1 5. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 

Madame Roland — Theroigne de Mericourt — Reine Audu — Regicides — 
Girondins — Desmoulins — Carnot — Cavaignac — David — Santerre 
— Recantations — Banishments — N o Remorse — Sergent — Sanson 
— Laflotte — Drouet : Epilogue of the Flight to Varennes — 
Descendants. 

It is natural to ask what became of the principal revolution- 
ists, especially of the regicides. How many were assassinated 
or guillotined ? How many suffered banishment or poverty? 
How many cringed to or served Napoleon, whose reign 
was the negation of all liberty ? How many, surviving till 
the Restoration, ended by being royalists ? Were any 
visited with remorse ? 

Let us attempt to answer these questions, not with any 
purpose of demonstrating poetic justice, for we shall see 
that some of the most repulsive of the revolutionists under- 
went no retribution, but simply to relate facts. And before 
dealing with the regicides proper let us glance at the fate of 
the women who applauded at least the early stages of the 
Revolution. Madame Roland in 1790 desired the assassina- 
tion of the King and Queen by some new Decius, and she 
felt no spark of commiseration for Louis when she saw him 
pass on his way to trial. When, as a girl, she chafed under 
the humiliation of being relegated one night at Versailles to 
the attics, she little foresaw that levelling down, so welcome 
when it visited her superiors, might be carried still further. 
The envious dislike inspired in her by the Versailles Court 
was the same sentiment which led her daughter's governess 
to appear at her trial to reveal her table-talk. In lieu of 
exclaiming on her way to the scaffold, "Oh liberty, how 
hast thou been duped ! " she might have said, " How have 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 491 

I been duped ! " But enough has been said of her in a 
former chapter. 

One cannot help pitying that Amazon of the Revolution, 
Theroigne de Mericourt ; yet she was responsible for the 
death of Suleau, even if she did not actually kill him. That 
reactionary satirist had habitually ridiculed and insulted 
her. When, therefore, he fell into her hands on the day of 
the capture of the Tuileries, she showed him no mercy. 
He had been married but two months to the daughter of 
Peter Adolphus Hall, a Swedish painter, the Vandyke of 
miniaturists, long settled in Paris. Theroigne in her turn 
received no mercy, when, on the 15th May 1793, Jacobin 
viragoes, resenting her sympathy with the Girondins, 
publicly flogged her and tried to duck her in the Tuileries 
pond. Insanity befell her, though not immediately nor on 
account of this indignity. Straitened circumstances had 
forced her to remove from the rue de Tournon and occupy 
a fourth-floor room in the rue St. Honored On the 9th 
August 1793 she complained to the police of having been 
struck by the portress of the house where she lodged. 
Two days later women complained of having been named 
by her in a placard as, among her assailants. In May 1794, 
in a revolutionary opera by Bouquier, she figured — or 
rather Mile. Maillard figured for her — as a heroine ; but 
this was her last triumph, if triumph it can be called. She 
annoyed Couthon and St. Just by incoherent letters, and 
on the 27th June 1794 the General Security Committee 
ordered her arrest. The commissaries of Bibliotheque 
section went for that purpose and seized her papers, but 
found her out of her mind. She was placed in a private 
asylum, whence on the 19th July she wrote to Couthon, 
pressing him to call on her or allow her under escort to 
call on him. She complained that though anxious to write 
for the public good, she was deprived of paper and candles. 
She desired to return to her lodgings until quarters safe 
from intrigues could be found for her. She concluded by 
begging for a loan of 200 francs. She also wrote to St. 
Just on the 26th July, imploring release and a loan of 200 



492 PARIS IN 1789-94 

francs. She was deprived, she said, of light and writing 
paper, though anxious to write. Her brother Joseph, a 
chemist, on the 30th July, applied for the custody of her 
as a lunatic, and he had previously applied for a family 
council to deprive her of the management of her affairs, 
inasmuch as she -was not only insane but dangerous. 
Afflicted with the mania of persecution, she survived for 
many years as a raving lunatic, but latterly calmer, till 1817. 

TheYoigne was not the only female agitator whom ex- 
piation befell. Olympe de Gouges, turning moderate like 
her, was arrested on the 22nd June 1793 and guillotined in 
November. We have seen what farewell letter she wrote 
to her unfeeling son. 

Other female agitators saved their heads, but died in 
obscurity and indigence. Louise Reine Audu, who figured 
both in the march to Versailles and in the capture of the 
Tuileries, when she was shot in the thigh, desired in 
December 1792, being in poverty, to enter the gendarmerie, 
but this strange request was refused. She underwent im- 
prisonment at St. Pelagie, and ended her days in a hospital. 
Rose Lacombe, the provincial actress who started a female 
club, 1 and presented memorials to the municipality, offered, 
in July 1792, to join the army, but Vienot, the president of 
the Assembly, told her she was fitter to fascinate foreign 
tyrants than to combat them. According to Choudieu she 
figured as the Goddess of Liberty in festivals in 1793. She 
is last heard of as selling wine, sugar, and candles at the 
gates of prisons. 2 

Let us now turn to the members of the Convention. 
Three hundred and eighty-seven members voted for the 
death of Louis XVI., while 334 voted for imprisonment, 
banishment, or death subject to certain conditions. 3 Three 

1 Citoyenne Cornelie, one of its members, advocated in November 1793 the 
election by her sex of a female Convention, to possess a veto over the decisions of 
the male Convention, also the trial of female prisoners by female juries, and the 
nurture in a vast state institution of all infants from their birth. 

2 Revue Historique, May 1894. 

3 Only eight abstained from pronouncing him guilty of conspiring with the 
foreigner. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 493 

hundred and ten voted for a respite pending an appeal to 
the people, and 380 against it. Twelve of the majority 
reached or exceeded the age of ninety, while forty-eight 
became octogenarians. Many on the other hand had 
violent deaths. Lepelletier St. Fargeau was stabbed in a 
Palais Royal cafe the day before the execution of the King, 
for which he had voted. Marat did not long survive him. 
He is one of the most repulsive figures in the Revolution ; 
yet according to Barras, though clamouring for 10,000 
heads, he was for saving individuals. Barras saw him 
rescue a supposed aristocrat from being hung on a lamp- 
post by saying, " I know him ; this is the way to treat him," 
whereupon he kicked him and told him to be off. In like 
manner he rescued Theroigne de MeYicourt from the vira- 
goes, by telling them that they should despise her and let 
the law punish her, upon which he led her safely into the 
Convention. 

The Girondins, whom Charlotte Corday had thought to 
save by stabbing Marat, perished in quick succession. We 
cannot feel much sympathy for Petion, the mayor of Paris 
wittily nicknamed " Rainbow " by Madame de Stael, be- 
cause he always appeared at the end of storms, too late 
to stop the mischief. He was odiously rude to the royal 
captives on escorting them back to Paris from Varennes, 
yet grotesquely fancied that princess Elisabeth was en- 
amoured of him. It is true that he voted for a plebiscite 
on the fate of Louis XVI. He shot himself to avoid 
capture. 

Brissot, though an opponent of rigorous measures 
against emigres and priests, was largely responsible for the 
arrest of ex-ministers Delessart and Montmorin, indirectly 
therefore for their massacre at Versailles. He voted, 
indeed, for a plebiscite on the fate of Louis XVI., but he 
lacked the courage to vote against his death. Desmoulins, 
who by his heedless sarcasms contributed to Brissot's 
death, repented of this too late, but when Barnave, on being 
tried, saw Desmoulins in court and said, " Camille, we used 
to be friends ; shake hands with me," Desmoulins, though 



494 PARIS IN 1789-94 

agreeing to do this, had the cowardice to add that he 
regarded him as guilty. Considering, however, that Des- 
moulins perished for advocating clemency, much may be 
forgiven him. We feel less compassion for his associate, 
Danton, for he was accessory at least after the fact to the 
September massacres, he was distinctly accessory to the 
execution of the Girondins, and he helped to create that 
Revolutionary Tribunal before which he was destined in 
his turn to appear. He, too, fell in attempting to curb the 
passions which he had helped to let loose. "They who 
take the sword shall perish by the sword." Nor can we 
pity Fabre d'Eglantine, for he had the blood of Rabaut St. 
Etienne on his head. Rabaut, a Protestant ex-pastor, had 
been concealed by Payzac and his wife, staunch Catholics 
to whom he had rendered a service ; but the carpenter 
called in to construct his hiding-place mentioned the fact 
to Fabre, who immediately apprised the Public Safety 
Committee. The host and hostess were guillotined the 
day after their guest. 

It is needless to speak at length of Orleans-Egalit6, Jean- 
bon St. Andrdi, Feraud, Philippeaux, Lasource, Barbaroux, 
Buzot, Romme, Ducos, Lebon, and Carrier. Altogether 
thirty-three regicides were guillotined, and twenty-three 
were shot, committed suicide, or perished of privations. 1 
We must not, however, imagine that the most sanguinary 
Terrorists were of unmitigated ferocity. Joseph Lebon, 
who was so merciless in French Flanders, wrote affec- 
tionate letters to his wife while in prison. She, then 
herself in a different prison, gave birth to a son Emile, who 
became a judge at Chalon-sur-Saone, and in 1861, with 
excusable partiality, published an extenuation of his father's 
career. Affection, however, for his family cannot blind us 
to Lebon's crimes. 

Thus far we have spoken only of men who perished 
before or shortly after Robespierre, but some of those 
who had overthrown him underwent imprisonment or 
exile. I have already spoken of Billaud-Varenne. Collot 

1 Bourloton. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 495 

d'Herbois, guilty of great atrocities at Lyons, which he 
threatened to raze to the ground, was also sent to Cay- 
enne, where he cohabited with a negress. He died in 
1796, bequeathing his effects to Billaud. 

Carnot seems to have persuaded himself, and till 
recently succeeded in persuading posterity, that he was 
not responsible for the butcheries of the Revolutionary 
Tribunal, inasmuch as his signature to anything outside 
his military province was a pure formality. It has been 
proved, however, by M. Aulard x that he was actually the 
originator of some of the most atrocious decrees of the 
Public Safety Committee. He signed also the decrees 
against the Dantonists and against Madame Desmoulins. 
His military services have been much exaggerated. Napo- 
leon, who, though he had reasons for disliking him, for he 
had been one of the 9000 dissentients (out of three and 
a quarter million voters) from the life-consulate, declared 
that he had no practical knowledge of war, and that his 
theories of fortification were fallacious. Yet Arago, in 
a eulogium before the Academy of Sciences in 1837, 
held him up as a born strategist. Taken by his mother 
at ten years of age to a theatre at Dijon, the play con- 
tained military evolutions, and the boy interrupted the 
actors, telling them the guns were not properly posted. 
The audience roared with laughter, while the mother was 
in consternation. Needless to say, this is pure legend ; 
Arago told it in perfect good faith, but did not name his 
authority. What was well done at the War Office under 
Carnot was really done by his subordinates. 2 He is not 
therefore entitled to much pity when we find him pro- 
scribed and obliged to conceal himself. His retirement 
from political life under the Empire would command 
more respect did we not see him in 1810, after losing 
60,000 francs in a colonial mercantile speculation, accept 
10,000 francs a year, with arrears, as an ex-minister, 
together with an inspectorship of fortresses. Set to write 

1 Revue Bleue, September 7, 1S92. 

2 Revue des Questions Historiques, January and October 1893. 



496 PARIS IN 1789-94 

a pamphlet on fortifications, he spoke in it of Napoleon 
as "my sovereign." Did he forget that on the 12th July 
1796, as president of the Directory, he forbade officials 
to use monsieur instead of citoyen. " Let those who choose 
to monsieuriser return to their cliques, which allow such 
language to these messieurs, and let them renounce em- 
ployment by the republic." 1 In 1815 he accepted from 
Napoleon the title of count, and his son Hippolyte, it is 
said, liked in his letters to be "counted." Banished as 
a regicide in 181 6, he accepted a Russian honorary grade 
of general, he offered to give advice on the creation of a 
riding-school at Berlin — he, the "organiser of victory" 
against Prussia — and he was also implicated in a con- 
spiracy for overturning Louis XVIII. and proclaiming the 
Prince of Orange (afterwards William II.) king of France.^ 
Banishment had thus eclipsed his patriotism. He was 
honoured above his deserts by his remains being brought 
over from Magdeburg in 1889 and interred in the Paris 
Pantheon. His son and grandson, who seemed to borrow 
their lustre from him, were in reality far his superiors, 
morally, if not intellectually, and one would like to know 
something of his wife, from whom, rather than from him^, 
their sterling qualities must have been derived. 

Carnot was not the only ex -Terrorist who accepted 
office under Napoleon. John Baptist Cavaignac, father 
of the general who was at the head of the Republic of 
1848, in 1793-94, on a provincial mission with Pinet, 
ordered wholesale arrests, indited sanguinary despatches, 
and created tribunals which sent victims to the guillotine,, 
" Every day," wrote the two envoys, " sees some of their 
[aristocrats'] heads roll on the scaffold." In 1795 the Con- 
vention was besieged with complaints of their atrocities. Yet 
in 1797 he married Marie Juliette de Corancez without any 

1 Moniteur, 4 Thermidor, an 4. 

2 Vaulabelle, Revue de Paris, February 1896. In 18 14, in command of 
Antwerp when Napoleon fell, he accepted the white flag, and resumed his. 
cross of St. Louis. The Prince of Orange in 1819 sent an aide-de-camp to* 
Paris to negotiate with the anti-Bourbonists, but the King of Holland, apprised', 
of this audacious scheme, recalled his son from Brussels to the Hague.. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 497 

apparent objection being taken to his sanguinary ante- 
cedents. In March 1799 he became lottery manager under 
the Directory, retained that post under the Consulate, held 
offices under Joseph Bonaparte and Murat in Naples, and 
was made a baron. He died in exile in Belgium in 1829, 
having re-embraced Catholicism. Lequinio, "citizen of 
the globe " as he signed in 1792 every copy of his pan- 
theistic book les Prejugh Dttruits, besought a place from 
Bonaparte, and was at first a forest inspector, but ultimately 
a kind of consul at Newport, Rhode Island, where he died 
in 1813. One of the ablest Jacobin writers, who called 
forth a reply from Hannah More — she gave the profits, 
^240, to the refugee priests in England — Lequinio must 
have unpleasantly recollected how he had described 1792 
as "the year in which kings and priests are to be obliterated 
from the earth." 

What shall we say of Louis David, the painter, who, on 
the eve of Robespierre's fall, pledged himself to " drink the 
hemlock " with him, but in two days pitifully repudiated 
him ? This fanatical Jacobin became Napoleon's court 
painter, one of his barons to boot, and would doubtless 
have turned his coat once more in favour of the Bourbons 
but that he was banished as a regicide. He wore the 
livery of a tyrant compared with whom Louis XVI. was 
the mildest of rulers, 1 shared in that tyrant's fall, and died 
in exile in Belgium in 1825. Even his pictures had been 
relegated to an attic at the Louvre. 

Santerre, the brewer whom Dr. Johnson, in company 
with Thrale, visited in 1775, probably acted under orders 
when he directed the drummers to silence Louis XVI.'s 
last words. This pompous busybody and incompetent 
general 2 was imprisoned during the Terror. Robespierre's 
fall released him, but fresh troubles awaited him. He was 

1 Bourloton states that out of 207 surviving regicides 202 accepted service 
under Napoleon, who made one of them a duke, one a prince, ten counts, and 
fifteen barons. These ex-levellers became sycophants and would-be aristocrats. 

3 In April 1793 he obtained a rebate of 40,603 francs duty, on proof that the 
beer represented by it had been gratuitously supplied to national guards and the 
populace. 

2 I 



498 PARIS IN 1789-94 

re-arrested in 1796, and in 1798 his wife, a staunch royalist, 
divorced him. He lost his money, recovered it by land 
speculations, and lost it again, this time irretrievably, 
having only a small military pension left. Ultimately he 
lost his reason, and imagined that the English had bought 
of the Vendeans an iron cage in which they meant to 
exhibit him. The Vendeans, he believed, had made the 
cage, intending to burn him alive in it. He was anxious 
to be appointed governor of a fortress, that he might be 
safe from both these enemies. In this state he remained 
till his death in 1809. General Turreau, who had com- 
mitted atrocities in Vendee, served both Napoleon and 
Louis XVIII., and Francastel, a member of the Conven- 
tion, likewise guilty of cruelties there, became gardener 
to Napoleon's mother. 

Several of the " Conventionals " accepted the Restora- 
tion. Bishop Gregoire, who had said, in August 1792, 
"the history of kings is the martyrology of peoples," 
attended in 1814 Louis XVIII.'s Te Deum at Notre Dame. 
Rabaut-Pommier, brother of Rabaut St. Etienne, held 
a Protestant thanksgiving service, but was nevertheless 
banished. He was, however, allowed to return to France 
in 1818, on proof that his vote was not reckoned among 
those condemning Louis XVI. Prieur (Cote d'Or), one 
of Napoleon's counts, applied to the monarchy for em- 
ployment. Merlin (Thionville) also gave it his formal ad- 
hesion and offered his services. Sebastien Mercier, who 
had ridiculed the comte d'Artois (afterwards Charles X.), 
went with the Institute to compliment him on his arrival 
in Paris. Lindet, however, declined to recognise either 
the Empire or the Restoration, and resumed his practice 
at the bar, dying in 1825. 

The regicides had been left undisturbed in 1814, but 
in 1816 such of them as had served Napoleon on his 
return from Elba were banished. Most of them retired 
to Belgium or Holland. Even Cambaceres, though not 
liable to banishment, followed their example, and died 
in Belgium in 1824. The exiles were anything but a happy 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 499 

family. With rare exceptions impenitent, they had bicker- 
ings, and some were even a prey to fear of assassination. 
Sieyes, ex-priest and Napoleonic count, became imbecile, 
fancied that Robespierre was threatening his life, and would 
give directions, " If M. de Robespierre inquires for me 
say I am out." Readmitted into France in 1830, he lived 
till 1836, and prescribed himself a civil funeral. Mallarme - 
died, an octogenarian in second childhood, at Mechlin in 
1835. But Debry, the advocate in 1792 of tyrannicide, 
banished although he had donned a white cockade in 1814, 
occupied himself in his Belgian exile with astronomy. 
Vadier, whose report on Catherine Theos, the visionary, 
opened the campaign against Robespierre, died penitent 
and religious in Belgium in 1828, aged 92. Isnard, also 
a convert to religion and monarchy, had knelt down in 
1814 on the spot where Louis XVI. was guillotined, to ask 
pardon of God and men. He survived till 1825. Merlin 
of Douai, ordered to quit Holland, was shipwrecked at 
Flushing, whereupon the King, more compassionate than 
any other sovereign to the exiles, for he had himself known 
the bitterness of banishment, said, " The sea has given him 
back to me ; I cannot give him back to the sea ; I keep 
him." He took as secretary a fellow-exile, Choudieu, who 
had previously been a vinegar-maker and a proof-reader, 
and who, returning to France in 1830, died in 1838. 
Gamier of Saintes was less fortunate than Merlin. He 
reached America, but was drowned in 1818 by the cap- 
sizing of a boat on the Ohio. In the Terror he had de- 
manded death for all emigres and expulsion for all foreigners. 
Lakanal had a better chance. After being rector of New 
Orleans university he returned to France in 1830, and died 
at the age of eighty-three in 1845. His second wife, aged 
thirty when in 1838 she married the man of seventy -five,, 
lived till 1881, enjoying a State pension. She was certainly 
the last surviving widow of a Conventional. Roger Ducos, 
in exile in 1816 at Ulm, was killed by being thrown from 
his carriage. Besson was in concealment from 1816 till 
his death in 1826. Thirion poisoned himself rather than. 



500 PARIS IN 1789-94 

go into exile to America. Fouch6, after serving and be- 
traying Napoleon, died in exile at Trieste in 1820. Two 
of his sons died without issue, but the third, Athanase, 
found a protector in Bernadotte, who made him his 
chamberlain and procured him a rich wife. A grandson 
is now equerry to Bernadotte's grandson, the King of 
Swden, 1 and in 1875 he brought Fouche's remains from 
Trieste for interment in France. 

Tallien, divorced in 1802 by his wife, the too famous 
Therese Cabarrus, who had become the mistress of 
Ouvrard, a wealthy army contractor, and practically dis- 
avowed by his daughter (she had married comte Narbonne 
Pelet), fell into extreme poverty, sold his books to stall- 
keepers on the quays, subsisted for the last few months 
on a pension of 2000 francs from Louis XVI 1 1., and died 
in 1820. 

Jacob Dupont, an ex-priest, who in 1792 publicly in 
the Convention avowed himself an atheist, became insane, 
and died in 1813. Bouquier, one of the five ex-Jacobins 
who did not seek office under Napoleon, a versifier of little 
ability, embraced Catholicism, and from 1795 till his death 
in 1810 lived in seclusion. 

The revolution of 1830 re-admitted to France forty- 
five surviving regicides, but they found themselves cold- 
shouldered. There were but two exceptions. Maignet, 
spite of his atrocities at Lyons and elsewhere, was wel- 
comed at Ambert, joined the bar there, and was even 
elected bdtonnier. He lived till 1834. Bar ere, the man 
pilloried by Macaulay, who had inhabited Belgium under 
an assumed name, and with terror of assassination, returned 
to Tarbes, and occasionally visited Paris, where he took 
tea with his old friend Lewis Goldsmith, 2 and brought 
busts of celebrities for his host's daughter (afterwards lady 

1 Intermediaire, 1896. 

2 He had, as it were, in 1803 been Goldsmith's colleague, for while the latter 
published in English the Argus, Napoleon made Barere editor of the Memorial 
Anti-Britannique, which, on the abandonment of the projected invasion of 
England, became the Memorial Europeen, and passed into other hands. Napoleon, 
however, refused to allow Barere to be elected to the Corps Legislatif. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 501 

Lyndhurst, who died in 1901) to draw from. He was 
elected a member of the departmental council, was pru- 
dently silent when questioned by Carlyle through a friend 
on the truth of his Vengeur story of 1793, and, pensioned 
by Louis Philippe, survived till 1841, to the age of eighty- 
six. He advised the son of an old colleague to shun 
politics : " You see by my example how it disturbs life." 
A recent proposal to erect a statue of him at Tarbes was 
denounced and collapsed. 

Sergent, an engraver who was nicknamed Sergent- 
Agate, on an unfounded imputation of appropriating a 
valuable agate ring, voted as a deputy for Paris for the 
King's death and other Jacobin measures. He was never- 
theless prosecuted with five other members of the sur- 
veillance committee in May 1793 for embezzlement of 
public money. This prosecution came to nothing, but on 
the 3rd June 1795 he was arrested on the charge of com- 
plicity with the bread rioters. He profited, however, by 
the amnesty of the 25th October 1795. Perhaps to get 
rid of his odious nickname, he subjoined to his name that 
of his brother-in-law, General Marceau, lived in retirement 
at Nice till 1847, and found a complaisant biographer or 
editor in Mrs. Simpson {nee Senior). 1 

Next to him in longevity comes Thibaudeau. It was at 
his instance that Paine was readmitted into the Convention, 
and that pensions were allowed to the widows of the 
guillotined Girondins. He took a prominent part in the 
Council of Five Hundred. 

One might have expected remorse on the part of 
Charles Henri Sanson, the executioner, for though he 
simply carried out the orders of the Revolutionary 
Tribunal, he ought to have felt that these were really 
murders. Balzac in un Episode sous la Terveur represents 
him as having a mass celebrated for Louis XVI. four days 
after his execution, and the Biographie Universelle speaks of 
his leaving money for an anniversary mass in St. Laurent's 
church. Another story is that he resigned after that 

1 " Reminiscences of a Regicide." 



502 PARIS IN 1789-94 

execution and died in six months. These are all pure 
legends. He remained in office till the 29th August 1795, 
when his son and assistant succeeded him, and he survived 
till the 4th July 1806, reaching the age of sixty-six. He 
left no such bequest. Uncertainty rests on the occasions 
when his place was taken by his son. The abb6 Carrichon 
evidently speaks of the latter when he states that at the 
guillotining of the Noailles family the executioner was a 
young dandy, who, however, had the humanity to place the 
victims, on alighting from the cart, with their backs to 
the scaffold, so that no one of them should actually see 
the execution of the others. This consideration cannot 
have been always shown, or Madame Roland would not 
have had Lamarche executed before her, so that the aged 
man might not be unnerved by seeing her die. 1 Carrichon, 
however, adds that the executioner pulled off the bonnets 
of the duchesse d'Ayen and her daughter so roughly as to 
give them pain by their hair being wrenched. Executioners 
from 1688 to 1847, the last of the Sansons, a prisoner for 
debt, was no more heard of, but may have left descendants 
under a changed name. 

Some, however, of the worst Terrorists escaped all 
punishment, and apparently suffered no remorse. Remorse 
ought to have been felt by Pons de Verdun, for he was 
largely responsible for the execution of thirty-five in- 
habitants of Verdun, seven of them women or girls over 
sixteen, who had more or less welcomed the Prussians 
in September 1792 as deliverers. Yet he tranquilly held 
judicial office under Napoleon, was banished, indeed, as 
a regicide from 1816 to 1830, continued through life even 
down to 1836 to publish insipid verses, and died in peace 
in 1844, aged 85. Alexandre de Laflotte, the spy 
and informer of the Luxembourg prison, is another 
example. He began by serving in the army, and was at 
the siege of Gibraltar in 1782. Vergennes' patronage 
introduced him into diplomacy, and he was charge 

1 Madame St. Amaranthe, moreover, is said to have vainly begged to die 
before her children, and to have fainted on seeing her daughter beheaded. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 503 

d'affaires first at Genoa, then at Florence. Returning 
to Paris, he was arrested on the 29th March 1794, 
and sent to the Luxembourg. He had not long been 
there when he denounced 150 of his fellow-prisoners 
as conspiring to force their way out of prison and 
massacre the Convention. He gave evidence against 
them, and was largely responsible for their condemnation. 
Transferred on the 4th April to a guard-house, he was 
again at the Luxembourg when Robespierre fell, and con- 
trived to get liberated as having been persecuted by him. 
Thereupon he retired to Douai, and practised unmolested 
as a barrister till his death. 

Compared with this man, even the jurors of the Re- 
volutionary Tribunal are excusable, yet it is strange to find 
that those who were still living in 1815 were undisturbed 
and untouched by remorse. Dr. Souberbielle, though one 
of those who tried Marie Antoinette, led a tranquil life in 
Paris till 1848. The marquis Antonelle, one of the jury- 
men who condemned the poets Ch^nier and Roucher, 
turned royalist and Catholic, and lived to be a septua- 
genarian. 

Those, however, who seek examples of retribution may 
content themselves with the vicissitudes of Jean Baptiste 
Drouet, who, on the night of the 21st June 1791, prevented 
the escape from France of Louis XVI., his wife, sister, and 
two children. Let us first hear Drouet's account of the 
affair, as related by him three days afterwards to the 
National Assembly at Paris : — 

I am postmaster at St. Menehould, and was formerly a dragoon 
in the Conde regiment. On the 21st June, at half-past seven in 
the evening, two carriages and eleven horses were relayed at St. 
Menehould post-office. I thought I recognised the Queen, whom 
I had previously seen, and perceiving a man at the extremity of the 
carriage on the left, I was struck by the resemblance of his face to 
the effigy of the King on an assignat of 50 francs. These carriages 
being escorted by a detachment of dragoons, followed by a detach- 
ment of hussars, on the plea of protecting treasure coming from 
Chalons, it confirmed me in my suspicions, especially when I saw 



504 PARIS IN 1789-94 

the commandant of the detachment speaking in a very animated 
tone to one of the postillions. Fearing, however, to raise a false 
alarm, and being quite alone and unable to consult anybody, I 
allowed the carriages to start; but seeing the dragoons about to 
mount their horses to follow them, I ran to the guard-house, had 
the drums beat, and soon succeeded in preventing the departure of 
that troop. Immediately afterwards I took with Guillaume [district 
clerk, who had apparently been at the posting-house] the road by 
which the travellers had gone. On arriving [on nags] near Clermont, 
we were told that they had taken the Varennes road, and we turned 
towards that town, where we arrived by by-roads about eleven 
at night. It was very dark, and everybody was in bed. We saw 
the postillions baiting their horses, and resisting the remonstrances 
of the couriers, who pressed them to dispense with this. The 
carriages were drawn up close to the houses, in order to be less 
perceived. Alighting at an inn, I informed the landlord of the 
occasion of my journey. "Art thou a good patriot?" I asked. 
"Rest assured of that." "Well," I replied, "the King is here, and 
must be stopped." I urged him to go to the mayor and the com- 
mandant of the national guard, and collect other citizens to help us 
to arrest the King. Pending this help, another precaution seemed 
to us necessary to prevent his departure, viz. to block up the bridge 
by which the King had to pass. A wagon loaded with furniture 
was close by. It was immediately overturned and placed cross- 
wise, so that the passage was obstructed. We then, along with the 
procureur of the commune, approached the carriages, which were 
descending the road, and they were stopped, with the assistance of 
eight or ten well-disposed men. The commandant of the national 
guard, accompanied by the procureur, went up to the carriage and 
asked the travellers who they were and whither they were going. 
The Queen replied that she was in a great hurry, and begged to be 
allowed to proceed. She was asked whether she had a passport. 
She handed one to two ladies of her suite, who were conducted to the 
procureur's house, where it was read out. The passport bore the 
name of the Baroness de Korff. Some of those who heard it read 
out said this ought to be enough. We withstood this idea, because 
the passport was signed only by the King, whereas it should have 
been also signed by the president of the National Assembly. " If 
you are a foreigner," we said to the Queen, " how could you possess 
such influence as to have a detachment of hussars with you, and how, 
when you got to Clermont, had you such influence as to be escorted 
by a detachment of dragoons ? " After these reflections and on our 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 505 

persistency, it was decided that the travellers should not start till 
next day. They alighted, and were taken to the procureur's house. 
The King then, of his own accord, said, " Behold the King, my 
wife, and my children. We implore you to treat us with the respect 
which the French have always shown to their King." The national 
guards immediately collected in force, and the detachment of 
hussars at the same time arrived with swords drawn. They tried to 
approach the house where the King was, but we exclaimed that they 
should not carry him off without first killing us. They insisted 
on guarding the King. We replied that the national guard had 
arrested him and should alone guard him. The commandant of 
the national guard took the precaution, moreover, of sending for 
two small guns, which he placed at one end of the street, and two 
more at the other, so that the hussars were caught between two 
fires. They were summoned to alight from their horses; M. 
Jouglas refused. He said he would guard the King with his troop. 
He was told that the national guard would guard him and did not 
need his help. He persisted. The commandant of the national 
guard then ordered the gunners to take their places and fire. They 
took the fuse into their hands. But I have the honour of remark- 
ing that the cannon were not loaded. In short, the commandant 
of the national guard and his force acted so well that they succeeded 
in disarming the hussars. The King thus became a prisoner. 
Having thus performed our duty we went home amid the con- 
gratulations of our fellow-citizens. 

A letter from Fouchez, of the Varennes national guards, 
acknowledges that if the King had persisted in continuing 
his journey that night, the forty hussars could have accom- 
plished it. 1 But indecision was his fatal weakness. 

The Assembly, on the night of the 22nd, had been waited 
upon by Mangin, a surgeon at Varennes, who, starting at 
4 a.m., had galloped to Paris, 150 miles, by 7 P.M. Mangin 
had simply brought the news of the King's arrest, yet he 
posed at first as the principal actor, and Robespierre pro- 
posed that he should be awarded a civic crown, but this 
was shelved by reference to a committee. A similar result 
next day attended a motion for civic crowns to Drouet and 
Guillaume, but the Jacobin club conferred crowns on all 

1 Catalogue Charavay MSS., No. 173, 16. 



506 PARIS IN 1789-94 

three, admitted them to membership, and ordered their 
busts to be placed in its hall, which order, however, was 
not carried out. The minor theatres, too, invited them to 
performances, putting their names on the bills as an extra 
attraction. The Assembly, though hesitating to award civic 
crowns, had promised rewards. The Varennes national 
guards, indeed, on the 6th July, disclaimed any idea of 
recompense, and on the 28th August the national guards of 
Clermont followed suit, protesting that virtue should be its 
own reward, and would be sullied by grants of money. 
The St. Menehould municipality, on the other hand, hear- 
ing that Varennes was about to have the principal awards, 
urged that it had played the chief role, by despatching 
Drouet and Guillaume to Varennes. It asked, therefore, 
for reimbursement of 24,797 f rancs > paid by the town in 
1775 for the privilege of electing its own local functionaries. 
That body, moreover, had resolved on naming streets after 
Drouet and Guillaume, but this was not carried into effect. 
The Assembly on the 18th August resolved on present- 
ing guns and a flag to Varennes. The flag, captured by 
the Prussians in September 1792, is now in the Berlin 
Museum. Rewards were likewise accorded to twenty-six 
persons. Drouet headed the list with 30,000 francs. Sauce 
came next with 20,000 francs. Bayon, a Paris national guard 
who had followed and tracked the fugitives, and was only 
slightly forestalled by Drouet, also received 20,000 francs. 
Then came Guillaume, ex-dragoon and district clerk at St. 
Menehould, who recognised the Queen as she passed through 
that town, with 10,000 francs. Leblanc, the Varennes publi- 
can; his brother Paul, 1 a watchmaker; Justin George, son 
of the mayor, and grenadier captain of national guards ; 
Coquillard, a watchmaker ; Joseph Ponsin, 1 grenadier ; 
Mangin ; Roland-Drouet, major of national guards ; Itam 
or Itant, major of national guards of Cheppy ; Carr<§, com- 
mandant, and Bedu, major, of national guards of Clermont ; 
Thennevin, magistrate's clerk of Islettes ; and Fenaux, 
national guard of St. Menehould, had each 6000 francs. 

1 These two men threatened to fire into the carriage if it did not halt. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 507 

Regnier, of Montblainville, and Delion-Drouet, of Mont- 
faucon, who were lodging with Leblanc ; Barthe, a gen- 
darme ; Fouchez, national guard ; and Lepointe, gendarme 
of St. Menehould, had each 3000 francs. Veyrat, a tradesman 
at St. Menehould, and Legay, a national guard there, both 
wounded, being mistaken in the darkness for fleeing dragoons, 
had 12,000 francs each ; the widow Collet, whose son, a 
gendarme at St. Menehould, was shot by mistake, 2000 
francs ; Lebaude, wounded near Chalons, 2000 francs ; 
Linio, gendarme of Clermont, 600 francs ; and Pierson, 
gendarme, 400 francs. Four thousand seven hundred and 
fifty francs was also divided among the national guards 
who escorted the King back to Paris. 

These awards gave rise to great jealousies. Men who 
were not in the list envied those who were in it, and the 
latter had bickerings among themselves. Carre and Bedu 
at once refused the money, which the Assembly accordingly 
handed over for local objects at Clermont. Guillaume de- 
clined to take more than 400 francs, for the expenses of his 
visit to Paris, and even this sum, on the 3rd January 1792, 
he handed over for the military pensioners at Paris. Drouet 
drew his 30,000 francs on the 21st October. It is sometimes 
stated that he also refunded it, but I can find no evidence 
of this, and on the 18th July 1791 he had already received 250 
francs for accompanying the King to Paris. Sauce received 
payment on the 26th September, but first offered a portion, 
and eventually the whole, to Varennes. Most of the bene- 
ficiaries, indeed, found it expedient to hand over the money 
for local purposes, or to distribute it among the national 
guards or inhabitants generally, and some scandalous 
scrambles in the latter case occurred, especially at Mont- 
blainville and at Varennes, where thirty persons on the list 
refused any share. The three postillions put in a claim, 
urging that by insisting on stopping to bait and rest their 
horses outside Varennes they gave time to Drouet to block 
the bridge, and they pretended to have done this on purpose. 
The claim, however, was not allowed, but on the 13th June 
1792 Chevallot and Gentil, national guards at Varennes, 



508 PARIS IN 1789-94 

who must have been pertinacious applicants, received 
3000 francs each, though their comrades had disavowed their 
pretensions. There was also much bickering between St. 
Menehould, Varennes, and Clermont, as to presents of guns. 
Before relating Drouet's vicissitudes let us dispose of 
the minor personages in the drama. Guillaume on the 
13th and 20th November reappeared before the Assembly 
to ask for a post in the gendarmerie of the Marne. We do 
not hear whether he obtained it, but he reached the age of 
seventy, dying in 1840 from a fall into a well. He had 
latterly lived in a hut, a kind of bearded hermit, on a 
hill overlooking St. Menehould. Sauce, styled procureur, 
which we may translate town treasurer, was a tallow 
chandler. It was in his house that the royal fugitives 
arrested at Varennes passed the first night. The King's 
Bourbon appetite there compelled him to ask for supper, 
and he praised the Burgundy as the best he had ever 
tasted. It was to Madame Sauce that the Queen fruit- 
lessly appealed to facilitate an escape. She replied that 
she also had to think of her family, and could not expose 
them to vengeance and ruin. Sauce's reply to solicitations 
was : " I love my King, but I shall remain faithful to my 
country." There is reason to think that both Sauce and 
his wife, in common with a portion of the inhabitants, 
would readily have connived at an escape but for fear of 
consequences. This suspicion may account for the un- 
popularity which befell Sauce. Four months after the 
King's arrest a mob broke into his house, smashed the 
furniture, and dragged him off to prison. His accounts, 
too, were overhauled, though he appears to have been an 
honest man, and he was threatened with prosecution. 
Persecuted, perhaps, by royalists as well as Jacobins, he 
fell into a kind of persecution-monomania, and was glad to 
quit Varennes for a clerkship to the criminal tribunal at 
St. Mihiel. Other inhabitants, too, had left the town on 
account of the ill-feeling which prevailed. Nor were 
Sauce's troubles at an end. In September 1792 the Prus- 
sians occupied St. Mihiel, and threatened dire punishment 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 509 

on the actors of June 1791. Sauce fled to Troyes, whence 
tidings reached the Assembly that his wife had died, 
and that his eldest daughter's life was in jeopardy. The wife, 
fleeing in a panic, had fallen into a well. The Prussians 
extricated her, but her injuries or her fright proved fatal. 
The invaders repulsed, Sauce returned to his post, and as 
clerk had to sign the depositions against the Verdun inhabit- 
ants — men, women, and girls — who were sent to Paris in 
March 1794 to be guillotined for having welcomed the 
Prussians. He survived till 1824. Leblanc, the Varennes 
publican, had also to flee from the Prussians. 

But Drouet is the man who chiefly interests us. Born 
in 1763, he is said to have had a college education at 
Chalons, which would account for rhetorical compositions 
scarcely to be expected from a country timber merchant 
and postmaster's son. At eighteen he enlisted in the 
Conde dragoons, but after seven years' service returned 
home to join his mother or elder brother in the business, 
for his father had died in 1770. We have seen that he 
accompanied the royal family back to Paris, and they had 
again on the way thither to change horses at his post-house. 
On his return to St. Menehould menacing letters were 
addressed to him, as also to Guillaume. Whether or not he 
retained the 30,000 francs blood money — for so, considering 
the result, it may be called — his ambition then aimed no 
higher than a post in the gendarmerie, and this seems to 
have been promised him. Back in Paris, on the 13th 
November 1791 he presented to the Assembly a petition for 
this purpose, which was referred to a committee, and on 
the 20th he repeated the application. He also, on behalf 
of himself and the other postmasters between St. Menehould 
and Paris, solicited payment for the relays on the King's 
return journey, which, strange to say, had not been cleared 
off. 1 He had already in September been chosen one of the 
suppliants in the Marne — that is to say, had any of the 
deputies died he was on the list for filling the vacancies, 
but this contingency did not arrive. In the autumn of 

1 Proems- Verbanx de V Assemblee Legislative. 



510 PARIS IN 1789-94 

1792 he headed or joined a free corps of 500 men for 
resisting the invaders, and Goethe, under date of the 3rd 
September, writes in his " Campaign in France " : — 

I should mention a notable man whom I have seen, only how- 
ever at a distance and behind prison bars, viz. the postmaster of St. 
Menehould, who had clumsily allowed himself to be captured by 
the Prussians. He did not at all mind being stared at by the 
curious, and, though uncertain of his fate, appeared quite composed. 
The emigres maintained that he had deserved a thousand deaths, 
and they urged this on the chief command, but it must be said to 
its honour that on this as on other occasions it conducted itself 
with proper dignity and with noble equanimity. 

And on the 28th he says : — 

The postmaster of St. Menehould has been exchanged for 
persons in the suite of the King [of Prussia], captured on the 20th 
September between the baggage wagons and the army. 

The evidence of an eye-witness would seem conclusive, 
yet it is certain that Goethe mistook George, mayor and 
deputy for Varennes, for Drouet. On the 2nd October 
Carra and other members of the Convention, in a despatch 
from St. Menehould, stated that they had there met "le 
respectable George." "This good old man, thrown by 
order of our enemies into the dungeons of Verdun, has 
just been exchanged for the King of Prussia's secretary, 
who had been made a prisoner. The artless narrative of 
the cruel manner in which he was arrested, the privations 
which he underwent in prison, the firmness with which he 
replied to questions, perhaps also the touching costume 
in which he appeared among us, drew tears from all 
beholders." It was possible, indeed, for both men to have 
been captured and exchanged, but besides the silence of 
Carra, there is the silence of Drouet himself, who never 
failed to sound the trumpet over his adventures. Drouet, 
moreover, on the 3rd September, by 135 votes out of 204, 
was elected as the seventh of the ten deputies of the Marne 
to the Convention. It is evident that a prisoner in the 
hands of the Prussians would not have been elected. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 511 

There is, moreover, the testimony of the Crown Prince of 
Prussia (afterwards Frederick William III.) and of Lom- 
bard, the King's secretary, who, in a letter to his wife, 
distinctly states that he himself was exchanged, on the 
proposal of Dumouriez, for George : — 

The French princes vainly exclaimed against their victim 
being snatched from them ; the King's humanity prevailed, and this 
kind master agreed to everything in order to redeem me. 

George was father of the Justin George who was offered 
but refused a reward of 6000 francs. 

For the postmaster of a small town to become in four- 
teen months a member of the Convention was a rapid rise. 
We may give Drouet credit for a sense of duty in arresting 
the King, whose escape would have been regarded as a 
calamity, and up to this point he is exempt from reproach ; 
but henceforth his career commands no respect. The 
Convention, as we have seen, 1 twice sent him to the Temple 
to ask the captive king whether he had any complaint to 
make of his treatment. To choose him for this mission 
argues either thoughtlessness or wanton insult ; a man of 
any delicacy in Drouet's place would have refused the 
mission. On the 15th December he actually proposed to 
deprive the King of any communication with his family, 
but the Convention rejected this inhuman demand. He 
voted, of course, and spoke twice at the Jacobin club in 
favour of the King's death, as also for the proscription of 
the Girondin deputies. In July 1793, on a rumour of the 
Dauphin's escape, he went again to the Temple, where, he 
reported, he found the Dauphin playing at draughts with 
his keeper, and the Queen, her sister-in-law, and her 
daughter in good health. He escorted Charlotte Corday to 
prison, and delivered a rhapsodical eulogium on Marat. 
The Convention ordered its insertion in the daily bulletin, 
but this not having been done, Drouet next day com- 
plained, and called for the dismissal of the editor. On the 
4th September 1793, the anniversary of the prison massacres, 

1 See p. 142. 



512 PARIS IN 1789-94 

he proposed that if France should be invaded the im- 
prisoned "suspects" should be pitilessly slaughtered, so 
that the enemy might find a land covered with corpses. 
This sanguinary language was sternly rebuked by Thuriot. 
Five days afterwards Drouet was sent as a commissioner to 
the army of the North. Leaving besieged Maubeuge on 
the night of the 2nd October to procure relief, he fell with 
his horse into a ditch, could not overtake his escort, and 
was captured by the Austrians. He was taken first to 
Brussels, then to Luxembourg, and finally to the famous 
fortress of Spielberg l in Moravia. On the 15th September 
1794 the Convention received from its commissaries at 
Brussels an instrument with which it was alleged both his 
head and his hands were fettered while a prisoner there. 
It resolved that this should be on permanent view at the 
foot of the statue of Liberty on the place de la Concorde, 
inscribed " Peoples of the universe, behold the blessings of 
liberty." A veteran was to be stationed there to explain to 
children the mechanism of this instrument of torture. It 
is to be observed, however, that Drouet, in a full account 
of his captivity after his release, makes no mention of this 
machine, though he does complain of being kept without 
food for thirty-six hours, of being struck and spat upon by 
the prince of Thurn, of being immured in a dark, damp 
cell at Luxembourg, and of being insulted by French 
emigres on his way to Spielberg. There he allows that he 
was treated with humanity, though kept in solitary confine- 
ment and not permitted to communicate with his wife and 
children. By dint of two months' labour, which had to be 
carefully concealed from the turnkeys on their visits twice 
a day, he contrived a kind of parachute, unravelling his 
stockings and nightcaps to serve as thread, and utilising the 
curtain rods and the sheets off his bed. He hoped thus to 
descend from his upper room, get into a boat on the river 
Schwartz, which was visible from his window, and float 
down first the Schwartz and then the Danube, so as to 
reach Constantinople, which he seems to have imagined 

1 Where Silvio Pellico was immured, 1822-30. 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 513 

stood on the latter river. He would fain have fixed the 
21st June 1794 for his escape, as the anniversary of {t the 
memorable day when I saw success gloriously crown an 
enterprise at least as perilous as that which I meditated " — 
one does not see, however, what peril he incurred at 
Varennes — but indisposition forced him to wait till the 8th 
July. He tells us that as a farewell message he wrote on a 
plank with cherry-juice a letter to the Austrian Emperor 
complaining of his harsh treatment and justifying his 
escape. It is not easy to believe that he thus indited a 
letter of 500 or 600 words, or, what is more, was able on 
his release to quote it word for word. We can, however, 
conclude from the supply of cherries that his dietary was 
not amiss. 1 Like a second Icarus, as he says, he made the 
leap, for he had begun by cutting through the bars of his 
window, leaving them however temporarily in position, but 
he fell into the courtyard with unexpected velocity, which 
he attributes to his twenty-five- or thirty-pound bundle of 
clothes and provisions. The heavy fall dislocated his ankle, 
and he lay groaning and helpless till daylight, quite unable 
to scale the wall. For three months he suffered great pain, 
and then had for a time to use crutches, but in May 1795 he 
had tidings of his family, and on the 3rd November of that 
year he was released, being exchanged, with four other 
members of the Convention, for Madame Royale, Louis 
XVI.'s daughter. The irony of fate thus connected him a 
second time with one of the fugitives arrested by him at 
Varennes. 

On the 12th February 1796 Drouet was presented by 
the Council of Five Hundred with a horse as compensation 
for that captured by the Austrians. He had, while still a 
prisoner, been elected a member of that body, and on the 
23rd January he had been chosen as one of its secretaries. 
But on the 24th May he was a prisoner at the Abbaye as an 
accomplice of the anarchist Babeuf. The latter had corre- 
sponded with him, and had sent him suggestions for a 

1 Pellico also was offered cherries by his friendly warder, a Swiss named 
Schiller. 

2K 



514 PARIS IN 1789-94 

speech in defence of political clubs. Drouet, moreover, 
had placarded the Marne with bills advocating the revival 
of the Constitution of 1793. The Council of Five Hundred 
decided, by 141 votes to 58, that he should be prosecuted, 
and his wife seems to have vainly pleaded for permission to 
visit him. On the 16th August, however, filing through the 
bars of his three-story window, he lowered himself by a 
rope and escaped. This, at least, was the official version, 
but the truth is that the escape was connived at by the 
Directory, the rope being placed there merely to save 
appearances, and the trial and acquittal of the jailor for 
negligence being a farce. He is said to have also shared in 
the attempted seizure of the camp at Grenelle, after which 
he left Paris, concealed under straw in a milkwoman's cart. 
The Vendome jury acquitted most of the accused, the con- 
tumacious Drouet included, but meanwhile he had started 
under an assumed name for India. At the Canary Islands 
the English fleet under Nelson, while he was ashore, cap- 
tured the vessel, with his effects, leaving him penniless, 
but Drouet was sent back to France by the French consul. 
Arriving in September 1797, he petitioned the Council of 
Five Hundred, his term of membership of which had 
expired, for pecuniary assistance, and he was allowed 
26,000 francs to cover his losses by his Austrian captivity. 
He ought by this time to have been cured of politics, but in 
July 1799 he was one of the leaders of a club which met in 
the riding-school of the Tuileries, the building which had 
been occupied by the National Assembly after quitting 
Versailles. There on the 22nd July he denounced the 
cavalry inspectors for tolerating the presence of incapable 
fops unable to make a truss of hay or carry a sack of oats. 
Probably to get rid of such an agitator from Paris, he was 
appointed a commissary in the Marne, and nothing more 
is heard of him till consul Bonaparte made him sub-prefect 
of St. Menehould. The flaming democrat was content to 
serve a tyrant. In 1803 Drouet, then a widower, was an 
unsuccessful candidate for the Corps Legislatif. In 1807, 
on Napoleon visiting St. Menehould, Drouet escorted him 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 515 

over the battlefield of Valmy, and was admitted into the 
Legion of Honour. In 1813 he sought to be a police 
commissary-general, but the sub-prefecture was to be his 
ne plus ultra. 

The Countess Dash, in her "Souvenirs of the Restora- 
tion," tells a curious story of him. She states that when 
Marie Louise, on entering France as Napoleon's bride, 
stopped at Varennes to change horses, she was harangued 
and complimented by a man who, it was whispered to her, 
was Drouet. The officer in attendance had told the 
duchesse de Montebello, and the latter whispered it to 
the Empress. She drove off, leaving him red with rage 
at his unfinished speech, and she exclaimed, " How 
audacious of that man ! He cannot have known that 
Marie Antoinette was my aunt." Drouet was doubtless 
quite capable of complimenting sovereigns {quantum 
mutatus ab zllo), but Marie Louise did not pass through 
Varennes. 

On the fall of Napoleon, Drouet of course lost his post, 
being succeeded by Chamisso, apparently a brother of the 
author of " Peter Schlemihl " ; but on his old master's return 
from Elba he was elected, on the 10th May 1815, a deputy 
for the Marne in the short-lived Chamber. In 1816 the 
regicides were banished, and the police searched for him 
near Verdun, in the house of Courtois, a fellow-regicide. 
His son professed to have quarrelled with him, and to be 
ignorant of his whereabouts. His sister, a nun, represented 
him as dead. He passed three months in an old quarry 
near St. Menehould, was next a groom at St. Denis, and 
then an army tailor in the south. Under the name of 
Maergesse, pretending to be a Belgian, he then settled at 
Macon, with a German woman who had eloped with him 
from her French husband. She opened a small con- 
fectioner's shop, while Drouet, after failing as a distiller, 
acted as factotum to an aged royalist, attending to his 
garden and daily reading to him the Quotidienne, an ultra- 
royalist paper. Drouet had, of course, to affect sympathy 
with its opinions. This was the last stage in his chequered 



516 PARIS IN 1789-94 

career. Not till his death in April 1824 was it known 
through his concubine that the menial was the man who 
had arrested the royal family at Varennes. His elder 
brother died in 1833, at the age of eighty-three. 

Coquillard, the Varennes watchmaker, was killed in 1821 
by falling downstairs when drunk; and Signemont, com- 
mandant of the Neuville national guards, unaccountably 
overlooked in the list of rewards, was found dead some 
years after 1791 in the forest of Argonne, his body half 
devoured by wolves. A mystery hung over his fate. It 
may be added that of the four deputies sent by the 
Assembly to bring the King back to Paris, two, Potion and 
Barnave, perished in the Reign of Terror ; while a third, 
Latour - Maubourg, captured with Lafayette, spent three 
years in an Austrian prison. The fourth, Mathieu Dumas, 
had in 1792 to quit France to escape the Jacobins. He 
returned in disguise, wandering from place to place, sought 
refuge in Switzerland, and re-entered France on the fall of 
Robespierre ; but he had again to flee to escape transporta- 
tion to Cayenne, the il guillotine seche." Later on he served 
Napoleon, who made him a count, but he was captured 
in the retreat from Moscow. A peer of France under 
Louis Philippe, he enjoyed a tranquil old age, dying in 
1837, in his eighty-fifth year. It is but fair to say that 
of these four deputies who took charge of the royal 
family, all but Petion were respectful or even compas- 
sionate. Nevertheless the arrest of Varennes may be 
said to have brought ill-luck to nearly all the principal 
actors in it. 

It is natural to ask what descendants were left by the 
Revolutionists. Mirabeau had a natural son, Lucas de 
Montigny, who published several volumes of his papers. 
Robespierre, St. Just, Barere, and Carrier were unmarried. 
Couthon had a son, Antoine, born in 1787, who served in 
the army, was vice-consul in Italy, was decorated by 
Napoleon III., and lived till 1867. Antoine had a son, 
who left daughters. Couthon's widow married a doctor, 
Charreyre, and lived till 1843. Desmoulins had a son, 



THE FATE OF THE REVOLUTIONISTS 517 

Horace, who was a barrister in Paris, was decorated by 
the Bourbons, emigrated to St. Domingo, and died there 
in 1825, leaving only a daughter. He had also two 
daughters. Danton by his second wife 1 had two sons, 
George and Antoine, who, on their mother marrying 
Claude Dupin 2 (she lived till 1856), were brought up by 
her father. They had a cotton factory at Arcis, Danton's 
native place, and were unmarried. Antoine, already dis- 
posed to insanity, took fright at a deputation which went 
to congratulate him on the revolution of 1848, and com- 
mitted suicide. George survived till 1858. Antoine left a 
natural daughter, who in 1897, widow of Mennuel, was 
living at Arcis. Barnave and Vergniaud, if married, were 
childless. Condorcet had a daughter, who married Arthur 
O'Connor, the Irish refugee, uncle of Feargus O'Connor, 
the Chartist M.P. Brissot had three sons. The eldest, a 
sailor, died in St. Domingo. The second, a student at the 
Polytechnic School, refused the oath of allegiance to 
Napoleon, and was consequently expelled, for which he 
revenged himself, on the capitulation of Paris in 1814, 
by a placard stigmatising the fallen tyrant. The third, 
Anacharsis, who had a large family, kept a small wine- 
shop in Paris, and, being ruined by speculations, became 
bankrupt. A subscription was opened for him in 1830. 
A grandson of Brissot, a mediocre painter, died in 1892. 
Petion left a son, born in 1783; so also did Barbaroux. 
Madame Roland had a daughter, Eudora, who in 1799 
married her guardian's son, Ldon Champagneux, and had 
two daughters, Zelia and Malvina. She died in 1858. 
Her daughters left descendants. Buzot, Madame Roland's 
platonic lover, had, as we have seen, a wife, but no chil- 
dren. Billaud, Collot d'Herbois, and Chaumette were also 

1 She was a staunch Catholic, and made it a condition of marriage that he 
should confess to and be married by a recusant priest, Kernavenan, afterwards 
cure of St. Germain des Pres. 

2 Dupin, one of Napoleon's prefects and barons, had the baseness to 
propose, in 1797, that constitutional priests who had retracted should be 
discovered by adroit detectives being sent to them as sham penitents for con- 
fession. 



518 PARIS IN 1789-94 

married, but childless. 1 Adam Lux had two daughters, 
one of whom drowned herself through unrequited affec- 
tion for Jean Paul Richter. Carnot had two sons, Sadi, a 
mathematician who died young, and Hippolyte, minister 
of education in 1848, who died shortly after his son Sadi's 
election in 1887 to the presidency of the Republic. Marat 
had no children by his quasz-wiie. Lafayette had two sons, 
but the male line is now extinct. Fabre d'Eglantine had a 
son, who became a naval engineer, and under the Restora- 
tion accepted the cross of St. Louis. He married, in 1830, 
Agiathis, daughter of Sambat, a fanatical Jacobin, who 
till his death in 1826 retained the use of the republican 
calendar. Father and daughter were both miniature por- 
trait painters. Babeuf, the agrarian agitator, left a son ten 
years of age, Camille, who in 1815, to avoid seeing the 
Cossacks enter Paris, threw himself from the Vendome 
column. Of a second son, Caius Gracchus, born during 
the father's trial, nothing is known. Hebert left a daughter, 
named Scipion Virginie, who was born in February 1793, 
and her guardian obtained the restitution of her father's 
confiscated papers. Barras left descendants, but poor and 
obscure. Fouquier's daughter by his first wife was a 
staunch Catholic, and at her death in 1856 there was found 
among her possessions a bronze medal of the Virgin, which 
her father wore hung round his neck on the day of Marie 
Antoinette's condemnation. Her half-brother, of whom 
we have already heard, after serving in Napoleon's armies, 
and after a fruitless attempt to curry favour with the re- 
stored Bourbons, died in poverty in 1826. 

1 Chaumette's widow was arrested in August 1 800 for agitating against the 
Consulate in the faubourgs St. Antoine and St. Marceau. Portraits of Robes- 
pierre and Marat were found in her possession, yet Robespierre had executed 
her husband ( A. F. iv. 1329). 



APPENDICES 



APPENDIX A 

PROFANATION OF TOMBS 

The Jacobins, who had so little respect for the living, were not 
likely to show more for the dead, especially when lead was urgently 
required for bullets. Military exigencies and fanatical iconoclasm 
went hand in hand. On the ist August 1793 the Convention de- 
creed that on the 1 oth, the anniversary of the fall of the monarchy, 
the royal tombs at St. Denis and elsewhere should be destroyed. 
The organist of St. Denis has left an account of what happened 
there on the nth October. 1 The bodies of fifty-two kings and 
notabilities, whether in stone or lead coffins, were taken up and 
interred in one grave at the cemetery. The remains of Princess 
Louise, Louis XV.'s daughter, at the adjoining Carmelite convent, 
shared the same fate. A temporary foundry was established in the 
cemetery to melt down the lead. Henry IV. and Turenne were 
in such preservation as to be recognisable. Three of Du Guesclin's 
teeth were pulled out and presented to the organist, who continued 
in office when Christian services had been superseded by Decadi 
gatherings, at which, under the presidency of Sallart, the mayor, an 
ex-Benedictine, licentious songs were chanted. 2 

At Sens the bodies of Louis XVI. 's parents were taken up, 
" recalling them after their death," as a deputation on the 3rd June 
1794 told the Convention, "to an equality unknown to them in 
their lifetime." The deputation presented the hearts, together with 
several crowns and sceptres found in the tombs. The lead was to 
be used to kill the country's enemies. 

The Paris municipality in October 1793 ordered a search of 
tombs for jewels, gold, silver, bronze, or lead. Alexandre Lenoir 
saw Cardinal Richelieu's remains exposed to view at the Sorbonne 

1 Cabinet Historique, vol. xxi. 

2 In 1815 search was made for the remains, but as quicklime had been thrown 
over them very few bones were found. These were re-interred in a vault in the 
cathedral, with an inscription stating that they are the remains of eighteen kings 
(from Dagobert downwards) and ten queens. The body of Louise, queen of 
Henry III., which in the Capucin chapel at Paris had escaped profanation, was 
placed with them. 



522 APPENDIX 

chapel, and he had reason to remember it, for on his objecting to 
the profanation, a national guard pricked his hand with a bayonet, 
producing a permanent scar. The body was like a mummy. The 
skin was livid, the cheeks puffy, the lips thin, the hair white. A man 
cut off the head and carried it away. It passed through several 
hands, and one owner sawed it in two lengthwise. The rest of the 
body was removed with the tomb to Lenoir's Museum. Under the 
Restoration it was replaced in the Pantheon, and in 1867 the head 
was restored, but simply placed in a cavity. On the 25th June 
1895, in the presence of the Princess of Monaco, as representative 
of Richelieu's collateral descendants and owner of his castle and 
relics, the skull was sealed up. M. Hanotaux, the Cardinal's bio- 
grapher, was one of the spectators. 

The heart of another cardinal, Archbishop Noailles, at Notre 
Dame, was picked up and presented to the bell-ringer, who in 181 2 
restored it to the Noailles family. 

James II. 's tomb at the English Benedictine monastery, a short 
distance from the Sorbonne, was likewise despoiled, and the body 
disappeared. The lead coffin had been covered with a black silver 
pall, bits of which had been given to visitors as a cure for scrofula. 
Henry Parker, prior of the monastery, thus describes it in 1790: — 

In a small chapel on the side [of the nave] are the bodies of 
James II. of England and Princess Louisa, his daughter, and there 
is a small box which contains a wax bust of the said king. . . . 
This chapel is separated from the church by an iron railing, and the 
two bodies are surrounded by iron railings, but all the hangings are 
in the most pitiable condition. 1 

"F. S. M.," writing to the Gentlematis Magazine in 1798, 
says : — 

Whilst we at the Scotch College were thus forgetting, or en- 
deavouring to forget, hunger and want of liberty, other English 
prisoners at the Benedictines (another maison dor'ee) were amusing 
themselves with the bodily resurrection of James II. He was taken 
out of the coffin, where he lay folded in black silk velvet, of which 
Miss White, one of the witnesses of the scene, gave me a piece. 
She assured me he was like an original black lead pencil portrait I 
had of him which I found in the [college] library: his nose prominent, 
not a Roman nose, because the end of it was long and abundant, the 
lower part of his long oval face the reverse of prominent, his cheek 
what the country people call lantern-jawed. I forgot to ask what 
became of his body. 

1 S. 3656. 



APPENDIX 523 

A Mrs. Anne Gray White, with her son and two daughters — 
Mary Anne, aged 16, and Elizabeth, aged 14 — were among 
the English prisoners, and one of these girls was probably the 
writer's informant. An Irishman named Fitzsimons, living at 
Toulouse in 1840 — doubtless Gerard Luther Fitzsimons, a native 
of Quilen, county Cavan, an ex-Capucin monk, who, having been a 
colonel in the French army, was in 1821 allowed a pension on con- 
dition of being naturalised — gave an account which was published in 
Notes and Queries in 1850. 1 He states that there were two wooden 
coffins, one within the other, and an outer leaden one. The body, 
swathed like a mummy and redolent of camphor and vinegar, was 
in perfect preservation, the face being as though alive. He rolled 
the eyes and found them quite firm. The teeth were the finest he 
had ever seen, and were so firmly fixed that he vainly tried to pull 
one out for a lady prisoner. The hands and nails were elegant, and 
he bent every finger. The feet also were very fine. The body was 
exposed to view nearly a whole day, and the prisoners, French as 
well as English, gave money to be allowed to see it. The Jacobins 
said James was a good sansculotte, and they intended to put him 
into a hole like other sansculottes in the churchyard. (Qy. — The 
churchyard of St. Jacques des Hauts-Pas.) The body was carried 
away, but where it was thrown he never heard, and George IV. 
vainly, after 18 14, inquired for tidings of it. 

One might have expected that Fox, a descendant of James II. 
and engaged in preparing his biography, would have made inquiries 
while in Paris in 1802, but we do not hear that he even visited the 
Benedictine monastery, then turned to secular uses. 

The coffin of Princess Louisa, placed alongside her father's, 
seems to have attracted no attention. 

Miss Strickland, on visiting Paris in 1844, was told by Mrs. 
Fairbairn, the superior of the English Austin convent, that for some 
reason the corpse escaped demolition at the Revolution, though the 
Republicans broke open the coffin. They found the limbs supple, 
and, she believed, held some superstitious reverence for it, which, 
however, did not prevent them from making a show of it, and 
receiving from the spectators a sou or a franc. 2 This tradition, 
after the lapse of so many years, cannot be implicitly accepted, 
and Miss Strickland was quite mistaken in concluding that the 
body was re-interred at St. Germain in 1824. What was then re- 
interred were merely the bowels, which, originally consigned there, 

1 See Nineteenth Century, January 1889. 

2 " Life of Agnes Strickland," 1887. 



524 APPENDIX 

had been discovered during repairs to the church. The late 
Monsignor Rogerson possessed a glove-box made from a piece of 
the coffin carried off by a spectator of the desecration. James's 
body was in all probability thrown into a sewer or pit. This had 
been the fate of the royal hearts and bowels bequeathed to the Val 
de Gr&ce convent. 

The tomb of Mary of Modena at Chaillot nunnery, which also 
possessed James II.'s heart and that of Henrietta Maria, was likewise 
desecrated, and Henri IV.'s heart at la Fleche was exhumed. 

In December 1793 the district of Montelimar (Drome) ordered a 
search for plate, copper, or lead in the church of Grignan. Among 
the tombs consequently opened was that of Madame de Sevigne, 
interred there in 1696. Her hair was entirely detached. The 
mason Fournier cut off a lock, as also a piece of the dress. Pialla, 
the magistrate, sawed the skull in two, and sent the upper por- 
tion to Paris. He also appropriated a tooth. Veyrenc, a notary, 
received a rib. In February 1897 a piece of the dress was included 
in the sale of Baron Pichon's curiosities. In 1870, during repairs 
to Grignan church, the lower portion of a skull was found, and 
this is believed to be the portion left in 1792, albeit the Dominicans 
of Nancy possess an entire skull which they hold to be Madame de 
Sevigne's. 1 

Buffon's tomb at Montbard was destroyed for the sake of the 
lead. His son induced the Education committee of the Convention 
to request the municipality to place a small stone on the grave. 2 
This implies that the body had been re-interred. 

Madame de Maintenon, as has been aptly said, was treated as 
a queen by the Jacobins. In January 1794 her embalmed body 
was brought out from its tomb at St. Cyr chapel, stripped, dragged 
to a cemetery, and thrown into a hole. In 1802, St. Cyr having 
become a military college, the director, Crouzet, rescued it and 
buried it in the court, but his successor, General Duteil, resenting 
such honours, exhumed it in 1805, and it was consigned to an old 
chest in a garret. There many of the bones disappeared. In 1836, 
however, another director, Baraguey d'Hilliers, placed the remaining 
bones in a marble tomb in a side chapel, where they are not likely 
to be again disturbed. 

1 Figaro, 19th April 1897. 2 W. 165. 



APPENDIX B 



CONCORDANCE OF GREGORIAN AND JACOBIN 
CALENDARS 



Year i. 
Vendemiaire 
Brumaire 
Frimaire 
Nivose . 
Pluviose 
Ventose . 
Germinal 
Floreal . 
Prairial . 
Messidor 
Thermidor 
Fructidor 



Complementary days or Sansculottides 



A.D. 

22nd Sept. 1792. 
22nd Oct. 1792. 
21st Nov. 1792. 
21st Dec. 1792. 
20th Jan. 1793. 
19th Feb. 1793. 
21st March 1793. 
20th April 1793. 
20th May 1793. 
19th June 1793. 
19th July 1793. 
1 8th Aug. 1793. 
17th to 21st Sept. 1793. 



For year 2, simply convert 1792 into 1793, and 1793 into 1794. 



A.D. 

1st Oct. 1792 
1st Nov. 1792 
1st Dec. 1792 
1st Jan. 1793 
1st Feb. 1793 
1 st March 1793 
1 st April 1793 
1st May 1793 
1st June 1793 
1st July 1793 
1st Aug. 1793 
1st Sept. 1793 
17th to 21st Sept. 



1793 



Year 1. 

10 Vendemiaire. 

11 Brumaire. 

11 Frimaire. 

12 Nivose. 

13 Pluviose. 

11 Ventose. 

12 Germinal. 

12 Floreal. 

13 Prairial. 

13 Messidor. 

14 Thermidor. 

15 Fructidor. 
Sansculottides. 



In giving a table of the Jacobin calendar (edition 1871, iii. 158), 
Carlyle says, "Romme's first leap year is an 4 (1795)." Either 4 is 



526 APPENDIX 

a misprint or slip of the pen for 3, or Carlyle imagined that the 
Sansculottides, which were added to the twelve months of thirty 
days each, were reckoned as the beginning of a year and not as the 
end. The first Jacobin leap year day, or 6th Culottides, was the 
22nd September 1795, but it was the end of an 3, and the second was 
the 22nd September 1799 at the end of an 7. I may mention that 
the intention was to miss a leap year once in 129 years, so as to be 
more closely accurate than the Gregorian calendar, which misses 
three leap years in 400 years. The Jacobins did not therefore, 
like other people, omit leap year in 1800. The concordance of 
the old and new calendars from the 1st March 1800 is thus some- 
what complicated. The Jacobin new year's day usually answers to 
the 22nd September, but in 1795 it was the 23rd and so also in 
1799, while in 1803 it was the 24th. 

On the very day of Robespierre's execution an applicant asked 
the Convention to restore the old calendar, which everybody, he said, 
used in the provinces. Boissieu backed the suggestion, urging that 
sooner or later the new calendar would have to be flung into the 
fire; but La Reveillere Lepaux defended it, and the Convention 
declined to take action. Again, a fortnight later, on the 24th 
Thermidor, the Bonnes Nouvelles section of Paris asked for the 
abolition of the new calendar, as being unknown outside Paris, 
and isolating Paris from the rest of the world. It also solicited 
the abolition of the new weights and measures, which it said were 
unintelligible ; but there were murmurs, and nothing was done. 
Pinkerton in 1802 ("Recollections of Paris") found the concurrent 
use of the old and new calendars very inconvenient, and on the 1st 
January 1806 the latter was abolished. How little the Jacobin 
calendar was ever observed outside Paris is shown by the fact, 
mentioned in a police report of the spring of 1794, that the market 
gardeners and poulterers of the surrounding villages continued to 
send in their largest supplies on Saturdays. 



APPENDIX C 

REVOLUTIONARY PHRASES 

So many misapprehensions exist as to the origin of expressions 
employed in the Revolution that it is well to correct them. Let us 
begin with two phrases commonly assigned to Robespierre. The 
first refers to negro emancipation. "Perish our colonies," he 
exclaimed on the 13th May 1791, "if we had to sacrifice our 
glory, happiness, and liberty for them." This obviously suggested 
a passage in Vergniaud's speech on the 17th September 1792 in 
support of a motion declaring the Paris Commune answerable for 
the lives of its prisoners. He cited Tell as exclaiming, when about 
to shoot the apple, " Perish William Tell and his memory, provided 
Switzerland is free," and he added, " Perish the National Assembly 
and the names of all its members, provided that the French people 
are free, and that we prevent the crimes by which it is sought to 
dishonour them." The second is the term " F^tre Supreme." Be- 
cause Robespierre proposed the /He de I'j&tre Supreme, people 
imagine that he originated that name for the Deity. But it had 
been used by Massillon and Bourdaloue, the famous pulpit orators, 
a century earlier, and after them by Voltaire and Rousseau. In the 
National Assembly, on the 19th August 1789, the abbe Bonnefoi 
suggested the insertion in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 
an affirmation that " the Supreme Being had made men free and 
equal in rights." The Declaration, as ultimately adopted, con- 
tained the words, " In the presence and under the auspices of the 
Supreme Being." Vergniaud, however, objected to the insertion 
of a similar preamble in the Constitution of 1792. "We have 
nothing to do," he said, " with Numa's nymph or Mahomet's 
pigeon. Reason alone will enable us to give France the best 
constitution." Robespierre's use of the term "Supreme Being," 
however, certainly gave it increased currency among the Terrorists, 
but according to Laharpe it puzzled the multitude, so that a sans- 
culotte who spoke of God was silenced by a comrade with " Hold 
your tongue ! there is no longer a God ; there is only a Supreme 
Being." Robespierre's use of the term, nevertheless, did not dis- 
credit it in other quarters, for Joseph Le Maistre, the Catholic 



528 APPENDIX 

apologist, continued to employ it, and French Protestants used it 
during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. 

To Danton are assigned two well-known phrases. On the 16th 
August 1792, when the electoral delegates of Paris suggested the 
arming of the whole population, and the sending of suspects to the 
frontier in the front ranks of the troops, while the wives of sans- 
culottes should care for children and the aged at home, he advo- 
cated "terror" against reactionaries. The expression is not in the 
Moniteur, for, unlike most of the revolutionary orators, he did not 
read his speeches and hand over the manuscript to that paper. 
On the 4th September 1793 a Parisian deputation called upon the 
Convention to " placer la terreur a Vordre du jour" and Barere 
endorsed it as " un grand mot." Danton also, as is well known, 
exclaimed, "De l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace," but 
what has escaped notice is that this was probably suggested to him 
by Bacon's " Essay on Boldness," which, varying Demosthenes' axiom 
for orators, "Action, action, action," enjoined in politics, "What 
first? Boldness. What second and third? Boldness." The 
Essays had been translated into French, and Bonaparte later on 
took with him to Egypt a copy of the French translation; but 
Danton knew English. 

The motto, Liberte Egalite Fraternite, was first suggested at the 
Cordeliers club in June 1791, as one which should be worn on 
the breast by all soldiers. The suggestion probably emanated from 
Momoro, one of the Hebertists guillotined in the spring of 1794. 
Anyhow it was he who, in 1793, inscribed it on public buildings, a 
custom revived in 1870, so that we have even seen it figure on 
prisons. Rabaut St. Etienne — he too was guillotined — wished for 
the word propriet'e in lieu of fraternite. In the height of the Terror 
the words "ou la mort" were added, which, however, simply meant 
that the Jacobins would die rather than sacrifice the three desiderata. 
John King, in 1802, remarked that these three words had been 
nearly obliterated, but were still faintly visible. 

Ca ira, the revolutionary refrain, is commonly ascribed to 
Franklin, who, when ambassador in France, used to say of Ameri- 
can independence, fa ira. 

Sansculotte was derived from a satire, les Sans- Culottes, written 
by Lacueil in 1776 in retaliation on Gilbert, a versifier, for sarcasms 
on the philosophers or freethinkers. Gilbert was poor, and people 
of fashion applied the term to ill-dressed authors. In the Revolu- 
tion the phrase was revived, and the Jacobins adopted with pride 
what had been a nickname. 



APPENDIX 529 

La carrihre ouverte aux talents, usually attributed to Napoleon, 
was first used by Bishop Gre'goire * in his report on dialects. 

Let me add that the term " revolution " had been used by 
Barbier in 1751, and by Voltaire in 1764, to indicate a quiet 
transformation. When we are told, therefore, that the Revolution 
was predicted by Chesterfield and others, we should remember that 
they simply looked forward to a bloodless change of government. 

The phrase perfide Albion was popularised, if not coined, dur- 
ing the Revolution. Bossuet, however, had spoken of "perfide 
Angleterre"; and Madame de Sevigne, pitying James II., had 
denounced his perfide royaume. 

1 Who also coined the word " vandalism," to express the destruction of works 
of art by the Jacobins. 



2L 



APPENDIX D 

CORRIGENDA IN CARLYLE'S "FRENCH REVOLUTION" 1 

In 1834 Carlyle, who had just settled at Chelsea in the house 
which he was to occupy till his death in 1881, set to work on his 
"History of the French Revolution." He had spent a fortnight 
at Paris in 1824; but though the Revolution had doubtless even 
then interested him he had no thought of becoming its historian, 
or he might have interrogated survivors, not the mendacious Barere, 
indeed, but Robespierre's sister, or the juror Souberbielle. Yet 
we can hardly imagine Carlyle collecting depositions. What then 
interested him was social and architectural Paris — the narrow 
streets, the absence of foot pavements, the crowd of hucksters on 
Pont Neuf, the suicide's body at the Morgue. It was not till after 
1830, on the suggestion of Mill, who had paid an enthusiastic visit 
to the scene of the second Revolution, had made the acquaintance 
of Lafayette, and had written interesting articles on France in the 
Examiner, that Carlyle perceived a congenial subject, though he 
wavered for a time between the French Revolution and the Scottish 
Reformation, between Robespierre and Knox. When he had made 
his choice Mill sent him " almost a cartload of books," elsewhere 
he says "above a hundred," and though Carlyle, "after six weeks 
of baffling wrestle," abandoned the attempt to utilise the British 
Museum collection of pamphlets which later on furnished Louis 
Blanc his chief materials, he could consult the Moniteur, with its 
then imperfect index; the Histoire Parlementaire, a compilation 
of forty volumes then approaching completion ; and the Biographie 
Universelle ; not to speak of Lacretelle; the " 'prentice work " of 
Thiers, now deservedly forgotten except, strange to say, in English 
translations ; and minor annalists. He was thus not overburdened 
with materials. Had he begun his task at the present day we should 
have had doleful complaints of "shot rubbish," for patience was 
assuredly not one of his qualities, and he did not consider that 
every historian or biographer has to sift heaps of dross. Still less 
was he troubled with manuscripts. He wished, indeed, but could 

1 The references are to the edition of 1 871. 

53° 



APPENDIX 531 

not afford, to spend the winter of 1833 in Paris to prosecute re- 
searches; but even had he done so, the National (then Royal) 
Library had at that time no pretence of a catalogue, while the 
Foreign Office records and the National Archives were scarcely 
accessible. Even had the facilities been greater, he would perhaps 
have refused to sift the rubbish heaps: for on July 24, 1836, when 
nearing the end of his task, he wrote to his wife : " It all stands 
pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more 
about it, but to splash down what I know in large masses of colours, 
that it may look like a smoke and flame conflagration in the distance, 
which it is." He virtually wrote his book from the Moniteur and 
the Histoire Parlementaire, the latter now entirely superseded by 
Michelet (1847-63) and Louis Blanc (1847-55), tne latter of whom 
adopted some of Carlyle's epithets. Nobody, however, will dispute 
Carlyle's words : " You have not had for a hundred years any book 
that came more direct and flamingly sincere from the heart of a 
living man." 

Froude has admirably described the spirit in which Carlyle 
views the Revolution, the spirit of a Hebrew prophet, discerning 
Divine retribution on ill-doing ; and Carlyle himself styles it, in a 
letter to Sterling, "a wild, savage book, itself a kind of French 
Revolution. ... It has come hot out of my own soul ; born in black- 
ness, whirlwind, and sorrow." He thought it had "probably no 
chance of being liked by any existing class of British men," but it 
speedily achieved popularity. Mill described it in the Westminster 
Review as " one of those works of genius which are above all rules, 
and are a law to themselves " ; while Kingsley says : " No book, 
always excepting Milton, so quickened and exalted my poetical 
view of man and his history as that great prose poem, the single 
epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle's ' French Revolution. ' " x 

Carlyle's conception of the Revolution would not have been 
modified by further evidence, and it will continue to commend 
itself to English minds. It was not, moreover, in his temperament 
to revise subsequent editions of his books. From a man in whom, 
as in primitive times, priest, poet, and historian were blended, we 
cannot expect studious watch for corrections. His books, as he 
told the Edinburgh students in his Rectorial address, always made 
him ill ; consequently when once finished he thought no more of 
them. " In not many weeks," he wrote to Sterling when on the 
point of completing his task, "I can hope to wash my hands of 
it for ever and a day." A book with him was the eruption of a 
1 "Alton Locke," chap. vii. 



532 APPENDIX 

volcano — once active, thenceforth at rest. He parted with his 
literary offspring just as birds part with their broods. He suffered 
the reaction attendant on mental tension, and whereas Mill, with 
his more phlegmatic nature, retained to the last an interest in 
France, his vindication of the Revolution of 1848 against Lord 
Normanby being translated by President Carnot's father, Carlyle 
for the rest of his life showed perhaps even less than the interest 
of an average man of culture in a country which presents the most 
lurid page in human history. In his Lectures on Heroes in 1840 
he was bound, indeed, to speak of Napoleon, and had therefore 
to notice " the third and final act of Protestantism, the explosive, 
confused return of mankind to reality and fact, now that they were 
perishing of symbols and shams," while in November 1870, in a letter 
to the Times justifying the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, he re- 
ferred to the Revolution as 

embarkation on the shoreless chaos on which ill-fated France 
still drifts and trembles. . . . France made her great Revolution, 
uttered her tremendous doom's voice against a world of human 
shams, proclaiming as with the great last trumpet that shams should 
be no more. I often call that a celestial-infernal phenomenon, the 
most memorable in our world for a thousand years ; on the whole, 
a transcendent revolt against the devil and his works. 

But with the exception of these two utterances, one arising out of 
the nature of his subject, the other evoked by admiration for Ger- 
many and a sort of postscript to his " Frederick," Carlyle had nothing 
to say on France after the publication of his History in 1837. An 
index and chronological summary were added, indeed, but he made 
only two corrections in the text, and even these were not of his 
seeking, but enforced, as it were, upon him. In 1838 Admiral 
Griffiths, as an eye-witness of the sinking of the Vengeur, wrote to a 
London newspaper to contradict the highfiown account adopted by 
Alison and Carlyle from French writers, the result being a corre- 
spondence between Griffiths and Carlyle, and a fruitless attempt to 
elicit an explanation from Barere, the impenitent inventor of the 
legend. And Admiral Nesham's son, in 1854, wrote to tell Carlyle 
that the name was not Needham (as he had found it misprinted, 
though the Moniteur might have set him right), and that the sword 
presented by the Paris municipality in 1789 to his father was not 
"long since rusted into nothingness," but a relic carefully preserved. 
These are the only corrections which Carlyle made. One would 
fancy that Godefroi Cavaignac and other friends must have called 
his attention to further inaccuracies, but, if so, he took no notice of 



APPENDIX 533 

them. Even on a second visit to Paris in 1851 with Browning, 
when he met Thiers, he does not appear to have visited the spots 
associated with the Revolution. 

Contemporary criticism, moreover, was not such as to impel him 
to make corrections. Mill, who had himself studied the subject, 
said of him in the Westminster .Review in 1837 : "A more pains- 
taking or accurate investigator of facts and sifter of testimonies 
never wielded the historical pen ; " and Croker, in the Quarterly of 
1840, while mingling criticism with praise, confined himself to 
pointing out some slight mistakes — the number of the priests 
massacred at the Abbaye (twenty-one, not thirty), 1 the description of 
Maillard, huissier-a-cheval, as a " riding usher," 2 instead of a pro- 
cess-server doing business in the country, the taking of Marat for 
a veterinary surgeon, 3 instead of doctor to Artois's ostlers, and the 
supposition that Marshal Maille (Mailly) was massacred in Sep- 
tember 1792, 4 whereas the "septuagenarian" (he was then really 
eighty-two) was guillotined at Arras in 1794. Jourgniac, whom 
Carlyle quotes, had mistaken marechal-de-camp Maille for Mar- 
shal Mailly. Croker also denied, on the authority of Michaud's 
JBiographie Universelle, that the Prussians met with bad weather in 
Champagne in September and October 1792, but Carlyle, though 
he has exaggerated the downpour, had read Goethe's Journal, which 
speaks of heavy rain. Croker refers to the chapters on Varennes as 
an " admirable specimen of almost epic energy," forgetting that he 
himself in 1823 had written an article on that subject which might 
have saved Carlyle from some serious blunders, and strangely enough 
for a man so well acquainted with the Revolution, he describes the 
Vendemiaire rising as the "last struggle of Jacobinism," whereas 
it was the struggle of reaction. As for French critics, Philarete 
Chasles, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for 1 840, while declaring the 
work untranslatable and almost unintelligible, says nothing of in- 
accuracies, and the French translation, which did not appear till 
1865, attempted no corrections. 

It is certainly to be regretted that Carlyle did not keep his 
work posted up to date, nor pay any attention to the deluge of 
publications on the Revolution which was going on during the 
latter part of his lifetime and still shows no abatement. But we 
must take Carlyle as Nature made him. He was a seer, not an 
antiquary, and some inaccuracies do not prevent his book from 
being a classic. Just because it is a classic, however, it should 

1 iii. 23. 2 i. 169. 

3 i. 44. See his appointment in Vatel's " Charlotte Corday." 4 iii. 31. 



534 APPENDIX 

now be edited. Nobody, indeed, would propose excisions, though 
three chapters are a positive tissue of mistakes, still less additions, 
albeit numerous episodes have now come to light which Carlyle 
would assuredly have inserted had they been known sixty years ago ; 
but more or less serious errors should be corrected in foot-notes. 
Pending this standard edition, let me point out the principal 
corrigenda. 

Carlyle cannot be fairly blamed for repeating legends or mis- 
conceptions which at the time were almost universally credited. 
Thus the pillage of Reveillon's paper-mill was long regarded as a 
piece of revenge for oppression; but it was really due to some 
heedless words uttered by him at the election meeting in St. 
Marguerite's church. Green cockades were adopted by the mob 
in the Palais Royal gardens on the 12th July 1789, not because 
green was a "sign of hope," which it might have been in early 
spring yet not in the middle of summer, but because it was the 
colour of Necker's liveries. 1 Mirabeau's retort to De Breze was not, 
" Tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, 
and that nothing but the force of bayonets shall send us hence," 2 
but " We have met by the will of the nation, and we shall leave only 
by force." The substance is the same, but the form is less 
theatrical. The correct version was given by De Breze's son in the 
Chamber of Peers, 9th March 1833, and was confirmed by Mont- 
losier, who had heard Mirabeau's exclamation. Nor was Mirabeau's 
interview with Marie Antoinette a nocturnal one, 3 as alleged by 
that inaccurate gossip, Madame de Campan. He spent the night 
of July 2, 1790, at Auteuil, at the house of his niece, Madame 
d'Aragon, and next morning his nephew, Du Saillant, disguised as a 
coachman, drove him in a closed carriage to St. Cloud, where he 
alighted at the foot of the Queen's staircase, and was ushered into 
her apartments, the King also being present. He may, however, as 
Madame de Campan relates, have said at parting : " Madame, the 
monarchy is saved." What is certain is, that he committed a 
breach of etiquette in not immediately writing a courtly letter of 
thanks for his reception, and that he had to be reminded of the 
omission by La Marck, 4 who told him that the Queen expected an 
effusive letter. The famous reply of Liancourt to Louis XVI. has 
also been inaccurately related. He did not wake up the King on the 
night of July 14 to describe the capture of the Bastille as not a 
revolt, but a revolution. 5 It was two days before, on apprising the 

1 i. 153. 2 i. 144. 3 ii. 104. 

4 Correspondence de Mirabeau et La March, i. 189; ii. 80. 5 i. 174. 



APPENDIX 535 

King of the ferment in Paris, that, to Louis's remark, "Why, it is a 
revolt, then," he answered, " No, sire ; it is a revolution." The 
fall of the Bastille was known at Versailles not at night but in the 
afternoon. Carlyle has adopted Jacobin exaggerations as to the 
famous Versailles banquet which formed the pretext for the march 
of the Paris mob. 1 The alleged orgie was the dinner usually given 
by their comrades to a newly arrived troop, and the Flanders 
regiment had been sent for on account of two unsuccessful attempts 
by a Paris mob (on August 13 and September 17) to march on 
Versailles. Desmoulins asserted that the dinner cost 26 francs a 
head; it really cost 3^ francs. There was no trampling on the 
tricolour, for the garrison had not yet relinquished the white 
cockade. 2 Nor did the women spontaneously initiate the march to 
Versailles. They were adroitly placed at the head of the procession 
in order that the troops might not fire, and perhaps also in order 
that they might exercise their seductions. 

Passing on to the " Feast of Pikes," the celebrated Baron Trenck, 
it should be known, was not then in Paris, 3 though the waxwork 
Madame Tussaud, or whoever wrote her book, "remembered" 
dancing with him that night, for he was then in Hungary, and had 
he foreseen the guillotine he would have remained there. Morande, 
the scurrilous pamphleteer, is mentioned by Carlyle as also a victim 
of that guillotine. 4 He richly deserved it, but he contrived to escape 
notice in the provinces, became one of Napoleon's justices of the 
peace, and lived till 1806. Carlyle did not implicitly accept the 
story of Mademoiselle Sombreuil's draught of blood, but cautiously 
said, "If universal rumour can be credited." 5 The story, however, 
did not rest on universal rumour, for it was first published, though 
not perhaps invented, by Legouve in 1800. He was less wary as to 
the Girondins' last supper, 6 an invention of Nodier, embellished 
later on by Lamartine. Another thrilling episode, the attempted 
rescue of the last batch of victims, 7 has been disproved by the 
publication of the report of the officers commanding the escort. 
The number of prisoners in Paris at the height of the Terror was 
not 12,000 but 8000. 8 Though rightly thinking little of Thiers' first 
and immature work, Carlyle adopted his grotesque blunder as to 
a contemplated monster guillotine, despatching 150 persons at one 
blow. 9 There was an intention of trying the Luxembourg prisoners 
in one batch, and Judge Dumas began constructing an enormous 

1 i. 211 ; Vitu, Repas des Gardes-du- Corps. 2 i. 212. 3 ii. 18. 

4 iii. 13. 5 Hi. 26. 6 iii. 169. • 7 iii. 169. 

8 iii. 229. • 9 iii. 229. 



536 APPENDIX 

scaffolding, a dock in which they were to be ranged in tiers ; but, 
on Fouquier-Tinville's representations as to the bad effect of such 
a spectacle on the public mind, the plan was abandoned. Thiers 
mistook ichafaud) in the sense of scaffolding, for echafaud, scaffold. 
The Goddess of Reason or Liberty was not Mademoiselle Candeille, 1 
for she had quitted the Opera in 1785 and was at the Varietes 
theatre. In the story of the flogging of the women at the dispersion 
of the Jacobin club, 2 Carlyle has followed Beaulieu, who, however, 
was not an eye-witness. Both sides told their story to the Conven- 
tion, and neither of them mentioned such an indignity. Lastly, 
Napoleon's account of his half-hour's deliberation before accepting 
the invitation to put down the Vendemiaire rising 3 is contrary 
to all testimony and probability. Napoleon was simply one of 
Barras's aides-de-camp, and Barras had four generals under him, 
all superior in rank to Napoleon. He had been daily importuning 
Barras for an appointment, but was strangely undiscoverable at the 
critical moment, being, indeed, in treaty with the insurgents. Not 
till he had found their offers or prospects uninviting did he repair to 
Barras, who had been vainly inquiring for him, and all the posts but 
that of aide-de-camp had then been filled up. 4 

I pass on to cases in which Carlyle's mistakes are less excusable. 
At the opening of the States-General he makes the procession go 
from St. Louis church to Notre Dame, 5 whereas it went from Notre 
Dame to St. Louis. There La Fare, Bishop of Nancy, after drawing 
an exaggerated picture of the oppression of the peasantry, turning to 
the monarch, exclaimed, " And all this is done in the name of the 
best of kings," whereat the expected plaudits resounded. The nobles 
did not at that ceremony wear " bright-dyed cloaks of velvet," 6 but 
black ones, to match their black coats, vests, and breeches. The 
cardinals alone, and there could have been only three, wore red 
copes, the other prelates having rochets and purple mantles. 
Fouquier-Tinville did not notify sentence of death to Lamourette 7 
or any other prisoner, for he was not judge, but public prosecutor. 
Madame de Buffon, Egalite's mistress, was not the " light wife 
of a great naturalist too old for her," 8 nor even the widow, but 
the daughter-in-law. The naturalist, a widower since 1769, 
had died in 1788. It was Buffon's son who, in 1784, married 
Mademoiselle Bouvier de Cepoy, in ignorance that both she and 
her mother were too intimate with Egalite, and that they had 

1 iii. 193. 2 iii. 255. 3 iii. 270. 

4 Memoires de Barras. 5 i. 117. 

6 i. 117. Journal du Baron de Gauville, 1864. 7 iii. 184. 8 i. 81. 



APPENDIX 537 

accompanied him to England. Buffon divorced her in 1793, and 
on the 3rd October of that year married Georgette Daubenton, 
but in a few months was guillotined. His first wife was inhuman 
as well as light, if it is true that she might, by her influence with the 
Jacobins, have saved her ex-husband. 1 Manifestly by a mere slip 
of the pen, which he should have corrected in the second edition, 
Carlyle likewise confuses Carnot with his son, styling him Hippolyte 
in lieu of Lazare. 2 The duel between Lameth and Castries did not 
take place in the Bois de Boulogne, 3 but on the Champ de Mars. 
Because Barnave and Cazales fought in the Bois, Carlyle apparently 
took for granted that all duels came off there. He also mistakes the 
origin of the term "sansculotte." 4 To be "destitute of breeches" 
was not a "mournful destitution," but was simply wearing the un- 
fashionable trousers instead of the fashionable garment. 

With Madame Roland, Carlyle seems to have had a fatality of 
inaccuracy. Her platonic lover was not, as he says, Barbaroux, 5 but 
Buzot. Fouquier's revolting questions to her were not put at the 
trial, 6 for the interrogatory was there conducted by the judge, but at 
the preliminary examination, answering to our committal for trial. 
On her way to execution she did not, according to the best autho- 
rities, exclaim on passing the plaster statue of Liberty erected in 
readiness for the festival of the 10th August, " O liberty, what 
things are done in thy name ! " 7 but " O liberty, how hast thou 
been duped ! " The reference was to the slaughter of her Girondin 
friends and to Jacobin tyranny. At the foot of the scaffold she did 
not insist on preceding the trembling Lamarche, 8 in order to show 
him how to die, but on his preceding her, that he might not be still 
further unnerved by witnessing her death. That she asked for pen 
and paper to record her thoughts 9 is, moreover, as Dauban remarks, 
" contrary to all probability." The spectacle of her being unfettered, 
and having writing materials brought her that she might write on her 
knees in the cart or on the steps of the scaffold, the executioner 
meanwhile waiting, would have been introducing a burlesque into 
a tragedy. Equally improbable, by the way, is Lavoisier's alleged 
request for a respite to finish some chemical experiments. 10 He 
had been busy in prison, along with his colleagues, in drawing up 
the accounts of the tax-farming, and on the eve of his trial had 
written to a friend an admirably calm farewell letter. But to return 

1 She had a son by Egalite, who was killed when serving in the English army 
in Spain, and in 1798 she married a Strasburg banker. Her successor, Georgette, 
survived till 1852. 

2 ii. 174. 3 ii. 99. 4 ii. 104. 5 ii. 184. 6 iii. 179. 

7 iii. 179. 8 iii. 179. 9 iii. 179. 10 iii. 224. 



538 APPENDIX 

to Madame Roland. She was condemned on the afternoon of 
November 8, 1 793. News of the condemnation reached her husband 
on the 10th, on the evening of which day he quitted his retreat and 
stabbed himself. He had not positively heard of her death, 1 and in 
the letter found on him he says : " I have quitted my retreat at the 
moment of learning that my wife was about to be butchered, and I 
will not any longer remain on an earth covered with crimes." 

Carlyle probably died without any consciousness of his gravest 
mistakes, his account of the King's flight to Varennes. It was 
not till March 1886 that Mr. Oscar Browning, who in the pre- 
vious autumn had been over the ground, showed, in a paper read 
before the Royal Historical Society, that that account, while "a 
very vivid picture of the affair as it occurred, in its broad outlines 
consistent with the truth," was "in almost every detail inexact," 
" almost every statement false or exaggerated." Carlyle's cardinal 
blunder was that he took the distance from Paris to Varennes 
to be only 67 miles, 2 whereas it is 150. I should imagine that 
he confused Varennes-en-Argonne with Varennes-Jaulgonne, a 
village not lying far off the route, now 66 miles by rail. From 
this blunder flowed a whole catalogue of errors, for which I 
must refer the., reader to the Historical Society's Transactions. 
Mr. Browning's paper is evidently not so well known as it should 
be, inasmuch as the Marquis of Ripon, at the London meeting 
in 1895 for the purchase of the Chelsea house, cited the flight 
to Varennes as an example of Carlyle's historical gifts. Suffice 
it to say that the pace of the royal carriage in Carlyle's narrative 
became three miles an hour instead of six and a half, 3 and that 
the carriage; itself became a huge lumbering vehicle, whereas it 
was a well-constructed post-chaise, going at an ordinary pace, on 
an occasion, however, when the pace should have been unusual, 
unless, indeed, there was fear of thus exciting suspicion. Mr. 
Browning is thorough, almost merciless, in his exposure of errors. 
He could not indeed be expected to pass over Carlyle's description 
of Drouet as in his nightgown, 4 instead of dressing-gown, at first 
sight as ludicrous a mistake as that with which Carlyle twitted 
William Taylor, who in Faust made the fainting Margaret ask her 
neighbour at church for her dram-bottle in lieu of her smelling- 
bottle. Nightgown, however, from Shakespeare's time to Walter 
Scott's, meant dressing-gown, 5 and Carlyle was excusable in not 
knowing the modern term. But Mr. Browning might have been 

1 iii. 180. 2 ii. 143. 3 ii. 143. 4 ii. 146. 

5 See letters in Spectator, May-June 1900. 



APPENDIX 539 

a little less severe on the town of Varennes being styled a paltry 
little village ; on Drouet being described as still in the prime of 
life, 1 when he was only twenty-eight; on couchee for coucher ; on 
Pont-de-Sommevelle for Pont-Sommevesle — both forms seem to 
have been used ; and on the presence of sunshine. This last 
correction is rather strained. Because the King's brother had a 
cloudy day for his journey to Mons, it does not necessarily follow 
that the sky was overcast from Paris to Varennes. It is but 
fair, moreover, to say that to ascertain the truth, amid the con- 
flicting depositions of witnesses eager to excuse themselves, is not 
easy, and that Mr. Browning must himself be corrected in some 
details by a later book on the subject, M. Victor Fournel's 
Evlnement de Varennes, 1890. Mr. Browning might, however, if 
he had glanced further on, have detected another mistake. Copying 
a misprint, Carlyle describes Drouet as imprisoned at Spitzberg, 2 
" far into the interior of Cimmeria," whereas he was cast into the 
well-known fortress of Spielberg. 

Inexcusable as the miscalculation of distance is, coupled with 
errors not all necessarily attendant on it, it would be ungracious 
to part from Carlyle without bearing testimony to his impartiality, 
and this is best done by quoting two Frenchmen of opposite 
parties, who both accuse him of bias. The royalist M. Mazel, 
in the Revue des Questions Historiques (October 1886), describes 
Carlyle as the earliest of the Dantonist historians, and as in general 
favourable to the Revolution, admitting its inevitableness, the 
Terror included, and admiring the liberalism of the Girondins. 
M. Mazel not inaptly compares him to Hamlet, with his alternate 
extravagances and lucid glimpses, his sobs and fits of laughter, 
lofty lyrism and rank buffoonery. Now hear an opposite view. 
A Frenchman, writing in 1864, maintains that Carlyle, while well 
fitted to become the historian of Puritanism and Cromwell, could 
not appreciate the French Revolution. 

He has seen only the evil in the French Revolution. He 
understands our way of acting no better than our way of thinking. 
He seeks the Puritan sentiment, and as he does not find it he 
condemns us. The idea of duty, the religious spirit, self-control, 
the authority of the austere conscience, can alone, according to 
him, reform a corrupt society, and nothing of this is found in 
French society. . . . The morality in vogue was the promise of 
universal happiness ; incredulity, empty talk, sensuality — behold the 
sources of this reform. Instincts were let loose and barriers thrown 
down ; corrupted authority was replaced by unbridled anarchy. 

1 ii. 146. 2 iii. 203. 



540 APPENDIX 

" But," he adds, 

put the good alongside the bad, and mark the virtues alongside 
the vices. These sceptics believed in proved truth, and would 
take her alone for mistress. These logicians founded society 
solely on justice. These epicureans embraced all mankind in 
their sympathies. These fanatics, these artisans, these starving 
and ragged peasants, fought on the frontier for humanitarian 
interests and abstract principles. Generosity and enthusiasm 
abounded here as with you English ; recognise them under a 
form not your own. They were devoted to abstract truth, as 
your Puritans were to divine truth. They followed philosophy, 
as your Puritans followed religion. Their object was the salvation 
of the world, while your Puritans' object was individual salvation. 
They fought against evil in society, as your Puritans fought 
against it in the soul. They were as generous as your Puritans 
were virtuous. They had, like them, a heroism, but sympathetic, 
social, eager for propaganda, which has reformed Europe, whereas 
yours served yourselves only. 

Will it be credited that this eloquent vindication of the Revo- 
lution was written by Taine — Taine who had not then studied it, 
but was destined to depict it in far darker colours than Carlyle, 
whom he mistakenly charges with one-sidedness ? It is surprising 
that none of his ardent critics should have cited the Taine of 1864 
against the Taine of 1884. 



INDEX OF NAMES 



An asterisk (*) indicates imprisonment, a dagger (f) guillotine or other violent 
death, and italics membership of the Convention. 



Abbas Pasha, 86 
*Abbema, 56, 58, 64-5 

Adams, John, 89 
+Admiral, H., 239 

Alcock, W. C., 339 

Alcorn, Michael, 93, 96 

Alexandre, 387 
*Amar, J. B., 108 

Anderson, James, 72, 90 
*Andigne\ bishop, 281 

Andign6, general, 261, 269 

Andrews, Miss, 360 
*Angely, Adelaide Corneille, 373 

Angouleme, duke, 145 

AngoulSme, duchess, 27, 30, 43, 48-9, 

I4S. 476, 5*3 
fAngran d'Alleray, 283 

Anselme, Mile., 326 
*Antonelle, marquis, 503 

Appleton, Thomas, 72 

Appleton family, 89 

Arago, F., 304, 495 

Archdeacon, 170 
*Arkwright, Thomas, 167, 170 

Armfield, Thomas, 328, 336 

Armstrong, general, 96 

Arnviside, W., 325, 349 
t Arthur, J. J., 170, 332-4, 342, 356, 374, 

467. 477 

Arthur, Lucile, 108 

Artois. See Charles X. 

Artois, countess, 46 

Astley, Philip, 25 

Auckland, lord, 329, 356 
*Audu, Louise, 492 

Aulard, A. , 44, 193, 489, 495 

Aumont. See Piennes 
fAuriol, Mme., 220 

Autichamp, marquis, 320 

Avaray, count, 320 

fBABEUF, Gracchus, 112, 198, 445, 480, 

513, 518 
*Bach, Dr. , 466 
Bacon, 198-228, 245-61 
Baillard Troussebois. See Carignan. 
fBailly, J. S. , 26, 43, 47, 120, 250, 260, 
265, 303, 304 
Bailly, Mme., 304, 399 
*Baldwin, S., 464 



Balny, 161 

Balsa, A., 59 

Balzac, H., 501 
*Bancal, H. , 99, 309 

Banks, Sir J. , 166 
\Barbaroux, C. J., 45, 14S, 310, 494, 537 

Barbaroux, Mme., 399 
*Barere, B. , 61, 91, 162, 263, 282, 347, 
450-1, 457, 460, 478, 481, 500, 516 

Barlow, Joel, 71, 82, 86-8, 90, 92, 93, 
283, 326, 329, 340 

Barlow, Mrs., 356 
1-Barnave, A. P., 43, 45, 54, 489, 493, 
516-7, 537 

Barneville, 274 

Barracaud, 127 

Barras, P., 145, 161, 189, 440, 446, 463, 

469, 471-4, 476, 481, 493, 536 
*Barry, Etienne, 242 

Batz, baron de, 28-9 

Baudrais, 122 

Baumier, 196 

Bay on, 506 

Bazin, 274 
fBeaulieu, L. A., 386 

Beaumarchais, A., 3, 36 

Beaumont, Mme., 435 

Beaupol, M. J., 80 
* Beauregard, 275 

Becagny, Mme., 387 

Becourt, 264 

Bedford, duke, 5 

Behenam, Joseph, 68 

Belanger, 167 

Bellavoine, 213 

Bellay, in 

Bellewes, M., 328, 336 

Behard, 80 

Benjamin, 137 
*Benoit, J. L., 92 

Bentham, Jeremy, 66 

BeYanger, 368 

Beraud, 207-25 

Beresford, 357 
fBerger, Claude, 392 
fBernard, Jacques Claude, 122, 141 

Bernard, Mme., 125 
fBernard, Jean Pierre, 122 
*Bernot, 329 

Berryer, Mme., 109 



54 2 



INDEX OF NAMES 



fBertier, E. , 279 

Bertin, Mile., 2, 266 

Bertolet, 119 

Besnier, Mme., 49 

Besson, A., 499 
*Beurnonville, general, 276 

Bevan, 99 

Bigard, no 
*Billaud Varenne, J. N., 95, 450, 452, 

458, 460, 488, 494, 517 
*Billington, 167 

Billopp, J. W., 93, 95 
*Billson, J., 170 

Bingham, captain, 334 

Bire, Edmond, 196 

Biron. See Lauzun and Boufflers 
*Bissot or Bisseau, P. F., 383 

Blackden, S. , 72, 80-2 

Blackden, Mrs., 356 

Blanc, 196, 258 

Blanc, Louis, 489, 530 

Blanc, Therese, 66 

Blanchard, 289-302 
fBlanchet, Martin, 422 

Bland, Thomas, 101 

Bochard, 472 

Boetzlar, 56-65 
fBoisguyon, Gabriel, 403 

Boissieu, P. J., 526 
*Boissy d'Anglas, F. A., 99 

Boldoni, Cajetano, 57, 69 

Bonaparte, Joseph, 497 

Bonaparte, Lucien, 127 

Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon 

Bonaparte, Pauline, 71 

Bonnay, marquis, 93, 102 

Bonneville, N., 38 

Bontemps, G. , 243 

Bosc, La, 308, 318 

Bosscha, 56, 58, 65 

Bouche, 107 

Boucher St. Sauveur, A. , 264 

Boucheseiche, 198, 228 
fBoumers, Amelie, 411 
*Boufflers, marquise, 174, 276 
fBougon, 356 

Bouquier, 500 

Bourbon, duke, 13 

Bourbon, duchess, 126 
*Bourdon, Leonard, 53, 124, 471 
*Boutmy, C£cile, 183 

Boyd, Walter, 271 
•fBoyer, Pascal, 284 

Bradley, John, 328, 337 

Bradt, abbe, 299 

Breguet, 139 

Brez<§, marquis, 43, 534 

Bridge water, duke, 277 

Briffaut, 468 
■fBrissot, J. P., 44, 86, 160, 280, 361, 369, 

493. Si7 

Brival, Jacques, 80 
*Broglie, abbe" C. , 369 
fBroglie, Victor, 280, 369, 386, 428 

Broome, S. P., 93, 96 

Brown, 57, 58, 63 



Browning, Oscar, 538 

Brun, Jean, 80 

Brunswick, duke, 290, 412 

Brunton, Elizabeth, 346 
fBuffon, G. le Clerc, 216, 524, 536 

Buller, 430 

Bulmer, B. , 328, 336, 339 
*Buonarotti, M., 445 
fBuret, J. B., 427 

Burges, Bland, 329, 332, 356 

Burgundy, John and Anne, 5 

Burke, Edmund, 63, 340 

Butler, 341 

Buys, 56, 58, 65 
\Buzot, Francois, 307-18, 494, 517, 537 

Buzot, Mme., 309, 312, 399 

Byrne, Miles, 343 

Cagliostro, 128 

Calas, Mme., 169 
*Calmet, Aug., 138 

Calonne, C. A., 1, 76 

Cambacires ,•} . J. K. , 498 
* Camion, P. J., 65, 80, 153, 194, 452, 
457-8 

Cambry, Mme., 389 

Campan, Mme., 534 
*Campbell, John, 166 

Campbell, Thomas, 345 

Campbell, , 360 

Campe, J. H. , 47 

Candeille, Mile., 536 

Cannet, Henriette, 284, 308 

Capellen, 59 
fCappon, general, 404 

Caraccioli, 182 

Carency, princess, 289 
*Carentan, Julien, 196 
fCarignan, marquis, 212. (The real name 
was Count Baillard Troussebois. ) 

Carlier, P. H. , 80 

Carlisle, earl, 277 

Carlos, Don, 48 

Carlyle, Thomas, 19, 21, 33, 134, 253, 
463, 501, 525, 530-40 

Carmichael, 351 

Carnot, L., 451-2, 459, 465, 486, 489, 
, 495. 5i8, 537 
jCarra, J. L. , 510 

■f Carrier, J. B., 46, 253, 305-6, 488, 494, 
5i6 

Carter, Thomas, 93 

Casanova, 57, 69 

Casans, 304 
*Cassini, J. D. , 150, 271 

Castlereagh, lord, 339 

Castries, duke, 26, 537 

Catharine II., 79 
fCauchois, Alex., 421 

Cavaignac, J. B. , 496 

Cavaignac, Mme., 256, 496 

Cazales, J., 43, 54, 537 
fCazotte, O., 11 

Cellier, 380 
*Chabanne, Mile., 170 
■\Chabot, F., 80, 113, 230 



INDEX OF NAMES 



543 



fChalgrin, Marie, 281 
fChalier, ]., 128, 217 

Chambon, A. B., 28 

Chambord, count, 48, 121 
fChamfort, N., 265 

Chamisso, 515 

Chammas, 57-9, 69 

Champagny, 190 
fChampcenetz, 152 

Chappe, C. , 273 

Charles X., 26, 42, 48, 498 
\Ckarlier, L. J., 112, 458 

Charmasse, 219 

Charmont, 202-30, 246 
fCharras, marchioness, 414 

Chartres, duke, 336, 501 

Chasles, P., 533 

Chateaubriand, R. , 27, 48, 435 
fChatelet, C. L., 468 
fChaudot, Mme., 220 
fChaumette, P. G. , 112-14, 119, 121, 
123, 125, 127, 146, 172, 357, 438, 454, 

471. Si7 

Chaumont, 246 
*Chauveau Lagarde, C. F., 395 

Chavrek, 56-9, 68 
*Chenevix, R., 166 
fChenier, A., 11, 35, 261, 381, 503 

Chinier, J., 112, 114, 244 

Chevalier, 56-8, 70 

Chevetel, 388 

Choppin, William, 328, 337, 358 
*Choudieu, P. R. , 499 

Christie, Thomas, 61 

Chuquet, A., 447 

Clarkson, Thomas, 357 

Clauzel, J. B. , 461, 481 
fClaviere, J. P., 170 

Claviere, Mme., 284 
-j-C16ment, A., 410 

Clement, L. , 227, 232 

Clermont, inhabitants of, 506 
*Clery, 49, 139 

\Cloots, Anacharsis, 12, 23, 42, 54, 58, 63, 
70, 88, 91-3, 97, 230, 353, 361, 423 

Cobbett, William, 347 

Cockayne, 335 
*Codrington, Sir W. , 365, 374 

Coffin, F. , 100 
fCoffinhal, P. A. , 482 
*Colclough, Caesar, 38, 62 
fCollin, F., 426 

Collot, 387 
*Collot d'Herbois, J., 115, 239, 349, 449- 
62, 468, 473, 478, 495, 517 

Colombier, 419 
fConceau (?), 380 

Conceil, 277 
\Condorcet, marquis, 31, 32, 46, 255, 265, 
270, 281, 361, 489, 517 

Contee, A., 72, 88 

Conway, Dr. Moncure, 37, 93 

Cooper, Samuel, 93 

Cooper, Thomas, 326, 348 

Coquerel, A., 350 
fCoquillard, 506-8, 516 



jCorday, Charlotte, 29, 36, 45, 198, 281, 
286, 368, 378, 493, 511 

Cordier, Mme., 182 

Corneille, P., 45 

Cornelie, Mme., 492 
fCostard, Mme., 284 

Coupi, J. M., 13, 397 

Cournand, 138 

Courteilles, 289-303, 306 

Courtois, E. B., 443, 481-2, 484, 515 
fCourtonnel, J. B. , 414 

Cousin-Duparc, 95 
fCoutelet, Marie, 402 
\Couthon, G. A., 44, 46, 100, 201, 218, 
361, 451-62, 465-74, 477, 482, 491, 
516 

Couturier, G., 127 

Cowley, prior, 32 

Cowper, William, 258, 351 

Coxe, H. H., M.P., 357 

Coypel, 342 
*Cressond, J. L. , 144 

Creuze la Touche, Mme. , 318 

Croker, J. W., 533 
*Cruise, 166 

Cumberland, duke of, 16 
*Currey, 168 

Curtayn, Jeremie, 328 

Curtius (Tussaud), 25, 535 
fCustine, general, 145, 271, 433 
*Custine, Mme., 433 



Dael, Alexandrine, 62 
Dallard, 83 
*Dallier, 371 
*Damas, Mme., 195 

\Danton, G., 25, 30, 35, 36, 43-4, 70, 
91, 95, in, 132, 152, 232, 240, 249, 
261-2, 309, 361, 376-7, 412, 444, 446, 
449, 452, 454, 460, 464, 480, 489, 494, 
517. S28 
Dare, lord, jj 
Dartmouth, lord, 351 
Dauban, C. A., 197, 310, 367/537 
*Daubigny, V., 482 ;-'"^r;;r* 

*Dauphin, the, 43, 47-9, 139-43, 182, 

211, 235, 290, 448, 481, 511 
* David, J. L. , 31, 260-6, 281, 361, 458, 

497 
*Davrauge, 172 

Debry, J., 499 
*Decaisne, Mme., 383 
*Delany, 168 

Delaroche, 5 

Delarue, 198 

Delaunay, 214-6 

Delaurent, 241, 244 

D6k4cluze, E. , 255 

Delille, J. , 306 
*Delormel, 272 
fDemachy, A. , 409 

Denoux, 112 

Deseine, 262 
fDesilles, Franfoise, 388 

Desland, L., 138 



544 



INDEX OF NAMES 



■\Desmoulins, C. , n, 12, 31, 36, 46-7, 

59, 192, 233, 282, 369, 375, 493, 516 
fDesmoulins, Lucile, 495 
fDespagnac, S. , 376 

Desroziers, Mile., 290 

De Starck, major, 361 
*Destournelles, 32 

Deydier, E., 80 
*Dibove, Mme., 172 

Diderot, 25 

Didot, Jules, 342 

Diggon, 166 

Digoine, marquis, 322 
fDillon, Arthur, 20, 62, 325 

Dochez, 126 

Dodet, 92 
fDortoman, general, 419 

Doye, Angelica, 95 

Drake, Francis, 481 
*Dromgold, Mrs., 167 
*Drouet, J. B., 142, 503-16, 538 , 

Droz, Joseph, 256, 279 
fDubarry, Mme., 254, 263, 281, 374 

Dubiez, F. N., 422 

Dubignon, Jan, 113 

Dubois, 116 

Dubois, Mme., 111 

Dubois de Berenger, Mme., 284 

Dubouchet, in 

Ducancel, 194 
\Duchastel, G. , 283 

Ducis, J. F., 259 

Duckett, W. , 328-9 
■\Ducos, J. F., 494 
\Ducos, Ro%er, 499 

Ducreux, 262 

Duevesque, 81 

Dufay, in 
fDufouleur, J. F., 255 
*Dufourny, 264 
fDufrene, L. , 407 

Dufriche des Genettes, 4 

Dugard, 397 

Dugasse, 199-229 

Dugommier, 487 

Du Guesclin, 521 

Dumas, Alexandre, 57-8, 70, 307 
*Dumas, Mathieu, 516 
fDumas, R. F., 458, 482, 535 

Dumont, E. , 57, 66, 282, 349, 379 

Dumouriez, general, 66, 360-1 

Dupin, Maurice, 174 

Diipin, A. S. O., 517 
*Duplay family, 440-59, 477-9 

Duplessis, Adelaide, 47, 192 
*Duquesnoy, A. C. , 283 
fDurand, J. J., 413 

Durand de Maillane, 475 

Du Roure, Mme., 270 

Duruzoir, 340 

Du Saillant, Mme. , 448 

Dusausoir, 244 

Dutard, 196, 268 

Edgeworth, R. L., 273 
Edgeworth, H., 12, 270, 284 



Edwards, Dr., 330 

Egalite\ See Orleans 
fElizabeth, princess, 30, 33, 42-3, 49, 
139-45, 253, 493 

Elliot, Hugh, 351 

Empaytaz, 80 

Erskine, lord, 341 

Escayrac, Mme., 420 

Escherny, count, 53 
fEspremenil, J. Duval d', 86 
fEspr^menil, Mme., 235 

Esquiros, H. A., 445 

Este, Lambton, 170, 355 

Eugene, prince, 17 

Eugenie, empress, 307 

Evans, Mrs., 271 

Ewbank, Joseph, 64 

\Fabre d' Eglantine , 494, 518 

Fairbairn, Mrs., 523 

Fanning, James, 344 

Fauchet, abb6, 60, 119 

Felix, general, 343 
fFerielon, abb6, 104 
■\Feraud, J., 494 

Fernig, Mile., 326 

Ferriere, 403 

Ferris, Edward, 328, 340, 356, 362 

Fidler, Thomas, 170 
fFitzgerald, lord E., 326, 334, 341, 349, 

35 6 > 3 6 2 

Fitzgerald, Pamela, 335, 355 

Fitzjames, duke, 320 
*Fitzpatrick, R., 166 
*Fitzsimons, 523 

Flachslanden, baron, 320 

Flahault, Mme., 354 
fFleuriot-Lescot, 121, 463, 470, 473, 

475 
"Florian, J. P., 157 

Foley, 166 
fFontevieux, J. B. , 388 
'"'Fossard, 480 

Foucault, E., 104 

Fouchi, J., 465, 500 

Fouinat, G. , 105 
fFoulon, J. F. , 279 

fFouquier-Tinville, A., 29, 42, 46, 174, 
197, 216, 253, 263, 284, 357, 364-438, 
445, 453. 463. 475. 5i8, 535, 537 

Fournel, V., 539 

Fournier, J., 105 

Fox, C. J., 326, 355, 523 

Fox, E. Long, 101 

Fragonard, J. H. , 263 

Francastel, 498 

Francois, 356 
*Franpois de Neufchateau, 259 

Franklin, B., 78, 528 

Franqueville, 196, 199 

Fr£lo, chevalier, 321 

Fremont, 404 

Frdron, L. , 27, 445-6, 456, 472 
*Fr6ville, A. J. F., 249, 367 
*Frost, John, 87, 326, 329, 330, 340, 343, 
34 6 - 359. 3 6 °. 3 62 



INDEX OF NAMES 



545 



Gall, F. J., 435 

Gamble, James, 170, 325, 328, 333, 342, 

349 

Gamble, Maria, 342 
Gambs, 177 

Garat, J., 85, 196 

Gardiner, S. R., 341, 
fGarnier de Launay, A. , 162 
■fGarnier, J. (Saintes), 499 

Garreau, 303 

Gastineau, T. J., 328, 342 

Gatteau, 482 
fGattey, F. and M., 425 

Gattie, Thomas, 170 

Gay- Vernon, bishop, 80, 113 
■(-Ge'ant, J. C. , 426 

Gechter, 108 

Gel6e de Pr£mon, 303 
fGency, A., 122 

Genevieve, Saint, 136 
\Genlis, count, 52, 55, 58 

Genlis, Mme., 271, 335-6, 355 
•fGensonne", A., 397-9 
*George, 510 

George III., 45, 75, 109, 207, 210, 213, 
245, 247, 259, 344, 348, 351, 352 
*Georget, A., 36-7, 175 

Gerard, baron, 263 
*Gerle, Dom, 440 

Gevers, 56, 58, 65 

Ghiselin, R. , 81 

Gibson, D., 328, 342 

Gillet, 92 

Ginguene\ Mme., 302, 304 
fGirey-Dupr6, J. M., 404 
■fGlatigny, Sophie, 226 

Glover, colonel, 345 
fGobeau, A. N. , 474 
fGobel, Bishop, 4, 16, 112, 240 

Godwin, W. , 346 

Goebel, Jean, 167 

Goethe, 510, 533 

Gohier, L. J., 436 

Goldsmith, Lewis, 88, 96, 361, 500 

Gomaire, J. R., no 

Gontaut, duke, 411 

Gorani, 352 

Goret, 140-1 
*Goriot, 179 
•fGorneau, E. , 406 
fGorsas, J., 395-8 

Gossec, 114 
fGouge, Olympe, 399, 492 

Goupilleau, J. F., 468 
fGouy DArcy, marquis, 430 

Gower, lord, 277, 329 

Goy, Gaspar, 57-9, 66 

Green, Joseph, 328, 342 

Grigoire, bishop, 67, 87, 264, 498, 529 

Gregorie, J., 93, 96, 325 

Grellet, E., 101 

Grenville, lord, 481 
*Grieve, George, 374 
♦Griffith, T. W., 81, 93, 95-6 

Griffiths, admiral, 532 

Grimm, F. M., 77, 79 



Grimston, captain J., 333-4 

Grivel, 198 
fGrout de la Motte, N. B., 390 
fGu^au de Reverseaux, J. P., 417 

Guerini, 99 
fGuillaume, 504-9 

Guillotin, Dr., 44 

Guyot, 418 

Guyton Morveau, 87, 128 

Haller, 242 
*Haly, 169 

Hamel, E., 439, 440, 442, 446, 479, 489 

Handel, G. F., 288 
fHanriot, F., 120, 131, 162, 199-228, 

2 56. 377. 463-71 
fHarel, J. V., 425 

Harmand, J. B., 170, 447 

Harrison, William, 39, 72, 90 

Hartley, James, 170, 354 
*Hassenfratz, 263 

Haussmann, baron, 14 

Hayley, W. , 346 

Heathcote, Page, 359 
fH£bert, J. R., 25, 35, 61, 119, 121, 147, 
227, 228, 230, 369, 423, 518 

Helvetius, C. A., 34 

Helvetius, Mine., 269 

Hemery, Mme., 442 

Henri IV., 521, 524 

Henrietta Maria, queen, 524 

Henry, 105 
*Henry, Barbe, 436 
\H£rault de Sechelles, J., 355, 361, 376, 

452 
fHermann, A. M. J., 126, 134, 161, 378 

Heyden, F. de, 57, 66 
*Hickson, N., 328, 342 
*Hill, William, 170 

Hodges, 350 

Hoey, Van, 64 

Hohenzollern, Amelia, 428 

Holcroft, T., 198 

Holland, lord, 354 

Hood, admiral, 355 

Home Tooke, J., 326, 341, 345 
*Hoskins, William, 93, 96 

Houdon, 78, 263 

Hourwitz, 56, 58, 67 

Howatson, 170 

Howell, G., 72, 89 

Huber, 64 

Huger, 82 

Hugo, Victor, 127, 384 

Humboldt, A., 357 

Ingraham, Joseph, 93, 97 
*Isnard, M., 499 

*Jackson, Mrs., 170 
t Jackson, William, 328, 334, 342, 357,. 
362 

Jacob, Jean, 51-4 

James II., 7, 8, 12, 522-4, 529 
*James, John, 170 

Jarnac, count, 319 



546 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Jarousseau, 199-211 

Jarvis, Benjamin, 72, 89 
*Jarvis, Ralph, 170 
fjault, P., 247 
*Jeanbon St. Andre", 452, 494 

Jeauffre, 133 

Jefferson, Thomas, 8 
fjerome, N., 475 

Johnson, Henry, 93, 95 

Johnson, Mrs., 170 

Johnson, Dr., 8, 19, 32, 35, 497 

Johnson, William, 331, 337-8 
f Jonas, 368 

Jones, A. and W., 74 

Jones, Paul. See Paul 

Joseph II., 64 
fjourdan, N., 238 
*Joyce, N., 168, 342 

Joyce, R., 328, 342 
*Julien, Denis, 372 
*/ulien, J. (Toulouse), 113 

Kearney, 169 
*Kellermann, general, 319 
*Kellet, Robert, 170, 190 

Ker, 271 
•\Kersaint, Armand, 285 

Kingsley, C, 531 

Kinnaird, lord, 277 
fKteber, general, 57 
fKock, J. C, 58-9, 64 

Kodrikas, 69 
+Kolli, Madeleine, 104, 402 
fKolli, Paul, 402-3 

Kosciusko, 88 

Laborde, 352 

Laborde-M6r6ville, 277 

Labuisse, Mme. , 405 

Labuissiere, 365 

Lacombe, Rose, 492 

Lacoste, 171 
"*Lacretelle, C, 530 

Lacroix, J. F. , 233, 240 

La Fare, bishop, 536 
^Lafayette, 12, 15, 34, 44, 47. 55. 82_ 3. 

262, 516, 518 
*Laflotte, A., 279, 502 

Lafon, 401 

Lafontaine, 81 

Lagny, 168 

Laharpe, n, 527 

Laignelot, J. F., 361 

Lakanal, J., 499 

Lalande, bishop, 113 

Laloy, P. A., 114 

La Luzerne, bishop, 107 
fLamarche, S. F., 171, 377. 537 

La Marck, 534 
•f-La Marliere, 487 

Lamartine, 32, 396 
fLamballe, princess, 49, 279, 448 

Lambel, J., 55 
*Lambert, Sir J., 159 
•j-Lambertie, Claire, 424 
*Lameth, C, 26, 55, 537 



Lamoignon, 277 
■\Lamourette, bishop, 536 

Lam tret, 468 
*Lapierre, Sophie, 112 

Laplace, 304 

La Reveilltre Lepaux, 148, 444, 526 

La Rochefoucauld, 59, 534 

Laroque, 397 

La Rouerie, marquis, 387, 392 

Lasne, 145 

Lasny, 91 

La Sosse, 232 
■\Lasource, David, 397, 494 

Latouche, Mile., 320 

Latour Lamontagne, 196-231 
*Latour Maubourg, marquis, 516 
*Latude, 186 
fLauzun, duke, 410 

Lavalette, count, 255 

Lavalliere, duchess, 8 

Lavater, 93 
fLaverdy, Jean, 405 
•JLavergne, Victoire, 284 
fLa Violette, Catherine, 411 

Lavit, Mme., 337, 361 
fLavoisier, A. L., 1, 2, 11, 35, 236, 265, 

271. 369. 537 

Lazerges, 307 

Lazouski, 187 
fLeias, P., 130, 442, 445, 460, 466-7, 
471-2 

Le Blanc, N., 274 

Leblanc, 506 

Leblond, A., 40-1 

Leboeuf, 144 
■fLebon, Jos., 444, 455. 494 

Le Breton, 198, 201, 246 
fLebrun, Tondu, 195 

L^chenard, 141 
*Lecointre, L., 440, 457 

Lecoq, 377 
*Lecoulteux, 174 

Leduc, B. , 285 

Lee, Arthur, 351 

Lefevre, Mme., 188, 247 

Le Fourdray, 407 
fLegardeur, D., 428 

Legouve\ J. B., 535 
*Legros, 379 

Le Harivel, 206, 208, 226 

Leinster, duchess, 335 

Lejay, Mme., 282 

Lejeune, general, 256 

Le Josne, 80 

Le Maistre, J. , 527 

Lemasson, J., 138 
fLemoine, G. A., 367, 401 

Le Monnier, Dr., 142 

Lenoir, A., 521 

Lenormy, 178 

Lenotre, G., 141, 328, 342, 439, 476 
fL6onard, G. , 408 

Leopold II., 42, 64 
■\Lepelletier St. Fargeau,^, 127, 157, 187, 
214, 240, 262, 449, 493 

Lepitre, 141 



INDEX OF NAMES 



547 



*Lequinio, J., 497 

Leroy, 127, 263 

Lescale, L., 319 

Leseurre, 467 
fLessart, A. de, 493 

Letasseye, 211, 213 

Letellier, 311 

Levasseur, Th6rese, 45, 102 

Lexington, Stephen of, 9 

Lewis, 343 

Lezay-Marn6sia, 86 
fLimoelan, P. de, 392 
*Lindet, bishop, 55, 112, 367, 452, 
498 

Lindsay, 329 

Linguet, Mme. , 270 

Lister, Dr., 9, 10, 22 

Livingston, H. W., 96, 325 
fLoiserolles, general, 285 
fLondel, 475 
*Lothringer, abbe\ 424 

Louis XIII., 4 

Louis XIV., 2, 9, 22, 186 

Louis XV., 126 
fLouis XVI.,flassim 

Louis XVII. See Dauphin 

Louis XVIII. , 13, 25, 41-2, 48, 481, 
496, 498, 500, 539 

Louis Philippe. See Chartres 

Louisa, princess, 522-3 

Louise, princess and queen, 521 

Loulan, Louise, 126 

Lowden, M., 81 

Lozeau, P. A., 461 

Lubbert, 83, 85 
fLubin, J. J., 121 
•j-Lubomirska, princess, 254, 428 
fLux, Adam, 368, 376, 518 
*Lynch, J. B., 170 

Macarthy, Charles, 150 

MacCurtain, 166 
*Macdermott, T., 189, 328, 343, 362 

Macdonell, J. E., 328, 330, 343 

Machyn, 251 

MacKenna, T., 166, 168 

Mackintosh, Sir J., 356 

MacMahon, 166 

Macpherson, J., 93 
*MacSheehy, 96, 168, 343, 347, 362 
*MacSwiney, 464 
*Madgett, N., 343, 362 
*Maignet, E., 500 
*Maillard, S., 533 

Maillard, Mile., 491 

Maillefeur, 467 
f Mailly, marshal, 533 

Maintenon, Mme. de, 524 

Majolier, 101 
fMalesherbes, C. G., 42, 235, 283 
*Mallarmi, A., 499 

Malmesbury, lord, 353, 362 

Mandrillon, J., 412 

Mangin, 505 

Mansvelt, T., 56-8 
fManuel, P., 138 



f Marat, J. P., 25, 29, 30, 44, 46-7, 119, 
123, 128, 143" 154, 157, 186-7, 198, 
214, 240, 262, 360, 367, 493, 511, 518, 

533 
fMarbceuf, marchioness, 212 

Marbot, A., 100 
fMarce\ general, 208 
*Marceau, general, 66 

Marcoz, J. B. P., 32 

Marshal, S., 128 
fMarie Antoinette, passim 
*Marie, 184 

Marie Louise, empress, 515 
*Marron, P. H., 57-8, 67, 80 

Marshall, T., 328, 344, 350, 354 

Marsillac, J., 99, 100 

Martens, 57-8 

Martin, 91 
fMartin, G., 416 
*Maskell, G., 170 
*Masquerier, L., 328, 344, 362 
*Massareene, lord, 12, 17 
*Massey, H., 170 

Masson, F., 291 
fMaulnoir, E., 415 
fMauny, 386 
\Maure, N. S., 105 
*Mauricot, 252 
fMaussion, E. , 419 

Maxwell, William, 328, 330, 345 

Mazel, 539 

Meavenworth, 82, 93, 96 

Meeke, S., 89 

Mehemet Ali, 66 

Menou, baron, 57, 68 
*Mercier, S., 2, 39, 116, 141, 198, 226, 
277, 498 

Merda, C. A., 472 

Merlier, 188 

Merlin, A. (Thionville), 98, 498 

Merlin, P. (Douai), 98, 499 
fMerlin, Pierre, 416 

Merry, R. , 330, 346 
*Meunier, 372 

Michelet, J., 463, 489, 531 

Mignot, Marie, 280 

Miles, William, 333 

Mill, J. S., 530-3 

Millot, Reine, 279 

Mills, J. B., in 

Milnes, 332-3, 350 

Minorty, 166 

Minto. See Elliot 

Mirabeau, 30, 35, 43, 66, 99, 102, 154, 
265, 439, 448, 516, 534 

Mirabeau, marquis, 10 
*Mirabeau, Mme. , 188 

Mirabeau, viscount, 53 

Miramon, 276, 436 

*Miranda, general, 88, 332, 356 

Modena, Mary of, 7, 524 

Moliere, 259 

Mollien, 258 
Molony, 166 

fMomoro, A., 112, 423, 528 

fMonaco, princess, 172, 192, 269, 369 



54« 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Monakmeti, 57, 69 

Monier, 229-31 

Monquin, 80 

Monro, George, 38, 329-34, 340, 346 

Monroe, James, 83, 93, 98, 170, 243 

Monsieur. See Louis XVIII. 
fMontelard, 479 
fMontjourdain, 369 

Montlosier, count, 534 

Montmorency, 3 
fMontmorin, count, 493 

Moore, Dr., 19 

Moore, Thomas, 344, 356, 361-2 

Moore, Maria and Peter, 271 

More, Hannah, 497 

Morellet, abbe\ 180 

Morgan, John, 359 

Morris, Gouverneur, 62, 71, 77, 79, 81, 
82, 93-8, 195 

Morris, Robert, 94 
*Mosse, F., 170 

Mountflorence, J. C, 80 
*Mousnier, J., 173, 429 

Moussard, 469 
*Mowat, H., 170, 328, 347, 362 

Moyroud, Mme. , 403 

Mugin, 468 

Muller, Melanie, 289-306 

Mulot, abbe\ 119 
fMurat, Joachim, 127, 497 

Murphy, 166 
*Murray, B., 328, 347, 362 

*Napoleon, 3, 15, 33, 57, 65, 67, 69, 85, 
88, 121, 157, 161, 186, 189, 290, 476, 
481, 490, 495-8, 500, 514-S, 517, 
528-9, 532, 536 
Napoleon III., 29 
Narbonne, Mme., 192 
Nassau Siegen, prince, 78 
Nelson, lord, 514 
Nesham, Admiral, 532 
fNeuveglise, Marie, 401 
fNewton, William, 328, 347, 362 

Nicklin(?), 95-6 
*Nivernais, duke, 167, 190 
fNoailles, marshal, and family, 34, 54, 

379. 5 02 

Noailles, archbishop of, 522 
*Nodier, C, 396, 535 

Normanby, lord, 532 
*Nuliard, 467 

Nyss, 59 

O' Berne, 166 
*0'Carroll, 166, 169 

O'Connell, D. , 353 

O'Connor, Arthur, 353, 517 

Oelsner, 18, 346 
fOge\ 125 

*0'Hara, general, 381, 487 
*01avide, 58-9 
*OHvier, 192 

O'Mealy, M., 93, 96 
*0'Neil, Dr. R., 168 

O'Neill, 328, 348 



O'Reilly, Mary Anne, 186 

O'Reilly, R. M., 327-8, 348 

Orelly, 272 
\OrUans, duke, 21, 29, 44, 126, 216, 

274, 277, 280, 335, 494, 536-7 
*Oroman (?), 168 

O'Ronan, 166 

Osiander, 56, 58, 66 
fOswald, John, 326, 328, 346, 348, 359, 
362 

Ouvrard, 500 

*Pache, J. N., 121 
*Packman, T., 170 

Padelin, 280 

Page, 57-8, 63 
fPaillot, general, 416 
*Paine, Thomas, 3, 36-8, 45, 101, 132, 
151, 170, 195, 210, 326, 329-30, 332-8, 
34o. 346, 354-5. 3S 8 -63. 37i. 395. 
399. 501 
*Palloy, 46, 129 

Paoli, P., 101 

Pare\ 196 

Paris, Nicolas, 126 
fParis, Pierre L. , 122, 475 

Pariset, 304 
*Parker, 82, 86 

Parma, duke, 50 

Paul Jones, John, 72 

Pay an (?), 468 
fPayan, C. F., 123, 131, 147, 162, 463, 

473 

Payne, James, 277 
fPaysac, marchioness, 417 

P6cheux, Marie, 264 

Pelletan, Dr., 47-8 
fPereyra, Jacob, 68, 352-3 

Perez, 395 
*Perkins, M. and R., 168 

Perou, 125 

Perreau, 80 

Perriere, 196-230, 260 
fPerruchut, N. , 487 
*Perry, S., 337, 361-2 

Persoons, 56-8 
fP&ion, 120, 138, 211, 310, 364, 444, 

493. 5i6 

Potion, Mme., 399 

Petit, E., 80 
fPeusselet, J. B., 230 

Pew or Pugh, 90 

Philidor, 160 

Philipon, 454, 468 
■\Philipfieaux, P., 488, 494 

Philippides, D. , 69 
*Piccini, 192 
*Pichegru, general, 451 

Pickford, P., 333 

Picqui, J. P. , 83 

Piennes family, 289 

Pigalle, 57-8, 70 
*Pigeon, Jeanne, 183 

Pigott, Robert, 58-9, 79 
fPinard, C. A., 409 

Pinet, 496 



INDEX OF NAMES 



549 



Pinkerton, J., 526 

Pio, 59 
*Pithoud, 244 

Pitman, Sir L, 272 

Pitt, William, 109, 202, 207, 1210-3, 
221, 247 

Pius VI., pope, 221 

Playfair, William, 87, 273 

Poitevin, 244 
fPoitou, abbe\ 232 

Pol, Van de, 59 

Pons de Verdun, P. L. , 502 

Ponticoulant, count, 281 

Pontgibaud, count, 290 

Potemkin, prince, 78 
*Potier, T., 328, 349, 362 
fPoulet, H. , 427 

Pourvoyeur, 198-228 

PreVost, abbe\ 7 

Prevost, Mile., 409 

Price, 56, 58-9, 62-3, 35s, 361 

Prieur, C. , 452, 498 

Prieur, P. L., 452 

Prince, 350 

Procter, J., 57-8, 63 

Provence, count. See Louis XVIII. 

Prudhomme, 7, 133, 253 

Prussia, prince Henry, 22 

Prussia, prince Frederic, 412, 511 

Pyot, 277 

*CjUATERMAN, J., 328, 349, 362 

Quenin, 325 

Raaf.J. J.,56, 58 
■\Rabaut St. Etienne, J. P., 377, 494, 

528 
*Rabaut-Pommier, 498 

Raet, de, 59 

Ramsden, T., 93 
*Rayment, R., 325, 328, 344, 349, 359, 
362 

Real, P. F. , 121 
fRegnault, Cecile, 239 

Reinglen, Mile., 322 

Remusat, Abel, 272 

Renan, E. , 439 

Rebellion, 265 

Reverseaux. See Gueau 

Reybaz, 98, 196 

Reynolds, Sir J. , 354 

Ricard, abbe\ 290, 297 
* Richard, Mme., 134 

Richardson, F. , 351 

Richelieu, cardinal, 25, 521 

Richelieu, duke and duchess, 289, 306 

Richelieu, marshal, 16 

Ricketts, W., 328, 350 

Rickman, T., 338 

Ricord, Mme., 444 

Ripon, lord, 538 
*Rivery, 433 

Robert, Mme., no 

Roberts, 290 
^Robespierre, Aug., 44, 442-4, 449, 458, 
461-2, 465-75 



* Robespierre, Charlotte, 440-44, 476 
\Robespierre, M. , passim 
f Robin, J., 225 

Robinson, H. Crabb, 345 

Robouame, 80 

Rochechouart, Mme., 306 

Rochegarde, countess, 322 

Rochereul, Mme., 280 

Rochford, lord, 351 

Roger, 275 

Rogers, S., 355, 361 
tRoland, 11, 44-5, 68, 157, 178, 196, 280, 

303, 308, 377 
tRoland, Mme., n, 27, 36, 44, 66, 106, 
134, 171, 178, 280, 284, 286, 307-19, 
376-7, 440, 490, 517, 537 

Rolin, 199, 202-27 

Rollin, 272 
■\Romme, C. G., 494, 525 

Ronsin, 471 

Rose, 62, 328, 350 

Rose, Mile., 321 
*Rossignol, general, 455 

Rotch, B. and W. , 99-100 
fRoucher, J. A. , 261, 263, 322, 503 
fRouettiers, J. B. , 414 
fRougane-Bellebat, P., 424 
*Rousse, Marie, 412 

Rousseau, J. J., 18, 25, 30, 45, 102, 287, 
289, 296, 311, 445 

Roussel, A., 180 
fRouviere de Boisbarbeau, 430 
fRoux, abbe\ 122, 141, 204 
*Rouyer, J. P., 80 

Rowles, 170 

Royer, 429 
*Russell, Joseph, 93-4 
fRutant, Jeanne, 394 

*Sade, marquis, 157, 171 
fSt. Amaranthe, Mme., 502 

St. Blancard, marquis, 321 
*St. Chamant, Miles., 183 
■fSt. Just, A., 12, 44, 46, 249, 361, 395, 

451-62, 482, 483, 4 6 S-78, 491, 517 
*Ste. Marie, Aug., 105 
fSt. Maurice, marquis, 212 

Sambat, 62 

Sance, 321 

Sand, Georges, 8 

Sands, D. , 101 

Sangrin, 40 

Sanson, 36-7, 338, 463, 501 
*Santerre, general, 35, 133, 256, 361, 

497 
*Santhonax, 83 

Sardo'u, V., 479 
*Sauce, 508 

Savary, William, 101 

Sayre, S. , 328, 351 

Schluter, 57-8 

Schmidt, Adolf, 197 
fSchmitt, G., 222 

Schweizer, 83, 86 

Sedaine, 130 

Segur, 78 



55o 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Selkirk, lord and lady, 74-7 

Sellier, 47 

*S6monville, Mrne., 269 
*Sergent Marceau, 154, 378, 501 
fSerpaud, J., 409 

Sevigne\ Mme. , 46, 524, 529 
*Seze, R. de, 41 

Shakspere, 259 
fSheares, H. and J., 328, 352, 359, 362 

Shelburne, Lord, 180, 257 

Sheridan, R. B. , 326, 338, 355 

Sherwin, 333 
*Sicard, abbe, 180, 278 

Sidney, Algernon, 34 

Sieyes, abb6, 361, 499 

Si Lamr', 56-8, 69 

Sillery. See Genlis 

Simmoneau, 80, 473, 475, 482 
•fSimon, Antoine, 36, 43, 142-4, 182 

Siret, 198, 230 

Skill, John, 328, 353 
*Skinner, capt. W. , 59 

Slade, T. M., 277 
*Slater, E., 168, 354 

Smith, colonel, 82 

Smith, Charlotte, 326 

Smyth, lady, 338, 354 

Smyth, Sir G. H., 355 
*Smyth, Sir R., 326, 336, 353-5, 362 

Soliman Aga, 26 
*Sombreuil, Mile., 535 

Somers, 332, 353 

Sorel, A., 193 

Souberbielle, Dr. , 479, 503 

Soulet, 198, 230 
fSourdille, Lavatelle P. J., 421 

Soutza, M., 69 

Stael, baron, 99 

Stael, Mme., 34, 290, 371, 493 
*Stafford, lady, 352 

Stamati, 57-8, 69 

Stanhope, lord, 357-8 
♦Stanley, T. F., 191 

Staphorst, 57-9, 65 

Steen, E. van de, 138 

Stephanopoles, D., 69 

Sterling, John, 531 

Sterne, 288 
*Stevens, Henry, 362 
*Stone, J. H. and Rachel, 82, 327, 362 

Stone, T., 90 

Stone, William, 340, 357 

Strickland, Agnes, 523 

Suard, 281 

Suffolk, lord, 351 

Sullivan, William, 84 

Sutherland, lady, 352 
*Swan, James, 72, 82-6, 90 

Sykes, Henry, 166 

*Tabouiller, Claire, 436 

Taine, H., 19, 149-50, 158, 190, 539-40 
•fTalbot, J. B., 190 

Talleyrand, 12, 352-5 

Tallien, J. L., 450, 460, 465, 500 
*Tallien, Mme., 345, 500 



Talma, 259 

Taney. F. L., 72, 88 
fTardieu de Malleissye, A. C. , 284 

Target, 284 
*Taschereau, 480 
*Tasset, J. and M., 288, 307 
*Taylor, 168 

Taylor, Janet, 81 

Teeling, 358 

Tennyson, A., 34 

Ternaux, Mortimer, 119, 149 

Terrasse, 367 
*Thelwall, J., 341 
*Theos, Catherine, 452, 499 
*Theroigne de Mericourt, 353, 491-3 

Thibaudeau, A. C, 97, 501 
fThibault, 203-5 
*Thibaut, Joseph, 91 

Thiebault, general, 18 

Thierry, D. , 397 

Thiers, A., 530, 533-5 
\Thirion, D. , 499 

Thompson, 332 

Thrale, 497 
*Thuriot, J. A., no, 133, 158, 400-1, '512 

Thurn, prince, 512 

Tickell, J., 328, 357 
*Tison, Jean, 143 
fTone, T. Wolfe, 344 ' 

Tooke. See Home Tooke 

Townsend, 57-8, 63 

Tracy, Destutt de, 272 
fTrenck, baron, 58-9, 262, 535 
■(•Trial, A., 479 

Tuetey, 54 

Turenne, 521 

Turnbull& Co., 61 
*Turreau, general, 498 

Tweddell, F., 328, 350 

*Vadier, M. G. A., 41, 93, 109, 452, 454, 

457. 481, 499 
*Valant, J. H., 3, 367 

Vallie, J. L. , 315 

Valliere, in 

Varennes, inhabitants of, 506 

Vatel, C, 198, 533 
fVatrin, Miles., 436 

Vaughan, B. and W., 361, 451 

Vauguyon, duke, 289 
fVemerange, 210 

Vendal, 392 

Vereux, F., 274 

Vergennes, count, 76, 502 
\Vergnia11d, P., 132, 361, 385, 517, 527 

Vernet, Mme., 31-2 
*Vernier, T., 105 

Vernon, W. H., 72, 89 

Vicq dAzyr, 80, 265 

Victoria, queen, 187 

Vienne, marquis, 322 

Vienot, 492 

Vigee-Lebrun, Mme., 35 

Vignaud, H., 81 

Vilaine, Euphrosyne, 106 

Vilde, Mme., 375 



INDEX OF NAMES 



55i 



Villeminot, L. N., 80 
♦Villenave, M., 290-307 

Villenave, Mme. See Tasset 

Villenave, Theodore, 307 

Villers, P., 440 

Vincent, F. A., 345 

Vincent, F. N., 61 
fVincent, G. , 390 

Vinet, baron, 321 
*Vitre\ Denis de, 362 
fVivier, Claude, 458 

Voltaire, 30, 259, 529 

Wacker van Zoon, 56, 58 

Walker, B., 82 

Walker, J., 328, 358 

Walkingshaw, Clementina, 190 

Walpole, H., 20, 167 

Walsh, Mme., 189 
fWard, general T. , 360, 362 
*Wardell, 328, 358, 362 

Washington, 84, 94, 98, 352 

Watt, James, jun., 324, 348-9 

Watts, William, 328, 358 



Webb, Joseph, 328, 358 

Welschinger, H., 484 
*White, C, 168 
*White, 36, 325, 334 
*White, Anna, 334, 522-3 

Whiteside, P. and W. , 93-4 
fWiedenfeld, J. H. , 418 

Wilkes, 32 

William V. , Stattholder, 65 

William II., Holland, 496 
*Williams, Helen M., 36, 61, 309, 326, 

3S6-7 
♦Willing, F., 94 

Witt, de, 64 

Wittert, N. C, 57-8 

Wolff, 263, 436 

Wordsworth, W., 257 
fWormestelle, G., 405 

Wycombe, lord, 59, 66, 354 

*Yorke, H. Redhead, 330, 337-8, 353, 
35 8 > 36 2 

*Zamor, 281 



THE END 



Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &* Co. 
.Edinburgh &* London 



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